“Don’t try a thing,” Ray said. “I don’t know if you can see it, but the knife’s right at her throat.”
“I can see.”
“That’s close enough. Put the bags down.”
It was Ray holding the girl, holding the knife. I knew his voice but I would have made him from TJ’s description, which was right on the money. His jacket was zipped so I couldn’t see the lame sport shirt, but I was willing to take TJ’s word for it.
The other man was taller, with unkempt dark hair and eyes that looked in the half-light like a pair of holes burned in a bedsheet. He wore no jacket, just a flannel shirt and jeans. I couldn’t see his eyes but I could feel the anger in his stare and I wondered what the hell he thought I’d done to provoke it. I was bringing him a million dollars and he was itching to kill me.
“Open the bags.”
“First let the girl go.”
“No, first show the money.”
The pistol Kenan had insisted on giving me was in the small of my back, its barrel wedged under my belt, its bulk concealed by my sport jacket. There is no terribly adroit way to draw it quickly from that position, but I had my hands free now and could go for it.
Instead I knelt and unfastened the snaps on one of the cases, lifting the lid to show the money. I straightened up. The man with the gun started forward and I held up a hand.
“Now let her go,” I said. “Then you can examine it. Don’t try to change the ground rules now, Ray.”
“Ah, sweet Lucy,” he said. “I hate to see you go, child.”
He let go of her. I’d barely had a chance to look at her, half-shadowed by his body. Even in the darkness she looked pale and drawn. Her hands were clutched together at her waist, her arms tight against her sides, her shoulders hunched. She looked as though she was trying to present the smallest possible target to the world.
I said, “Come here, Lucia.” She didn’t move. I said, “Your father’s over there, darling. Go to your father. Go ahead.”
She took a step, then stopped. She looked very unsteady on her feet, and she was gripping one hand tightly with the other.
“Go on,” Callander told her. “Run!”
She looked at him, then at me. It was hard to tell what she was seeing because her gaze was unfocused, vacant. I wanted to pick her up, toss her over my shoulder, run back to where her father was waiting.
Or tug my jacket aside with one hand, draw the gun with the other, and drop both of the bastards where they stood. But the dark man’s gun was pointing at me, and Callander also had a gun in his hand now, a companion piece for the long knife he was still holding.
I called out to Yuri, told him to call her. “Luschka!” he cried. “Luschka, it’s Papa. Come to Papa!”
She recognized the voice. Her brow contracted in concentration, as if she was struggling to make sense out of the syllables.
I said, “In Russian, Yuri!”
He replied with something that I certainly couldn’t understand, but it evidently got through to Lucia. Her hands unclasped and she took a step, then another.
I said, “What’s the matter with her hand?”
“Nothing.”
As she drew alongside me I reached for her hand. She snatched it away from me.
There were two fingers missing.
I stared at Callander. He looked almost apologetic. “Before we set the terms,” he said, by way of explanation.
There was another burst of Russian from Yuri, and now she was moving faster, but hardly running. She couldn’t seem to manage more than an awkward shuffle, and I wasn’t sure how long she could sustain even that much.
But she stayed on her feet and kept going, and I stayed on mine and looked into the barrels of two handguns. The dark man stared silently at me, still a study in rage, while Callander watched the girl. He kept the gun pointed at me but he couldn’t keep his eyes from turning to her, and I could feel how much he wanted to swing the gun, too, in her direction.
“I liked her,” he said. “She was nice.”
* * *
THE rest of it was easy. I opened the second suitcase and stepped back a few paces. Ray came forward to inspect the contents of both cases while his partner kept me covered. The bills got only a cursory examination. He flipped through half a dozen packs, but he didn’t count any of them, or make a rough count of the number of packets. Nor did he spot the counterfeits, but I don’t think anybody on earth would have.
He closed the cases and fastened their clasps, then drew his gun again and stood aside while the dark-haired man came to pick up both of them, grunting with the effort. It was the first sound he had made in my presence.
“Take one at a time,” Callander said.
“They ain’t heavy.”
“Take one at a time.”
“Don’t tell me what to do, Ray,” he said, but he put down one of the suitcases and went off with the other.
He wasn’t gone long, and neither Ray nor I spoke in his absence. When he got back he hefted the second case and pronounced it lighter than its fellow, as if this meant we’d cheated him on the count.
“Then it should be easier to carry,” Callander said patiently. “Go ahead now.”
“We oughta plug this cocksucker, Ray.”
“Another time.”
“Fucking dope-dealing cop. Oughta blow his head off.”
When he had gone Callander said, “You promised us a week. Will you keep your word on that?”
“Longer if I can.”
“I’m sorry about the finger.”
“Fingers.”
“As you prefer. He’s difficult to control.”
I thought, But you were the one who used the wire on Pam.
“I appreciate the week’s lead time,” he went on. “I think it’s time to try a change of climate. I don’t think Albert will want to come with me.”
“You’ll leave him here in New York?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“How did you find him?”
He smiled faintly at the question. “Oh,” he said, “we found each other. People with specialized tastes often find each other like that.”
It was an odd moment. I had the sense that I was talking to the person behind the mask, that our circumstances had provided a rare window of opportunity. I said, “May I ask you something?”
“Go ahead.”
“Why the women?”
“Oh, my. Take a psychiatrist to answer that, wouldn’t it? Something buried in my childhood, I suppose. Isn’t that what it always turns out to be? Weaned too early or too late?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Oh?”
“I don’t care how you got that way. I just want to know why you do it.”
“You think I have a choice?”
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“Hmmm. That’s not so easy to answer. Excitement, power, just sheer intensity—words fail me. Do you know what I mean?”
“No.”
“Have you ever been on a roller coaster? Now I hate roller coasters, I haven’t been on one in years, I get sick to my stomach. But if I didn’t hate roller coasters, if I loved them, then that’s what it would be like.” He shrugged. “I told you. Words fail me.”
“You don’t sound like a monster.”
“Why should I?”
“What you do is monstrous. But you sound like a human being. How can you—”
“Yes?”
“How can you do it?”
“Oh,” he said. “They’re not real.”
“What?”
“They’re not real,” he said. “The women. They aren’t real. They’re toys, that’s all. When you have a hamburger are you eating a cow? Of course not. You’re eating a hamburger.” A slight smile. “Walking down the street she’s a woman. But once she gets in the truck that’s over. She’s just body parts.”
A chill ran the length of my spine. When that happened my late aunt Peg used to say a goose must have just walk
ed over my grave. A funny expression, that. I wonder where it came from.
“But do I have a choice? I think I do. It’s not as though I’m driven to act out every time the moon is full. I always have a choice, and I can choose not to do anything, and I do choose not to, and then one day I choose the other way.
“So what kind of choice is it, really? I can postpone it, but then the time comes when I don’t want to postpone it any longer. And postponing just makes it sweeter, anyway. Maybe that’s why I do it. I read that maturity consists of the ability to defer gratification, but I don’t know if this is what they had in mind.”
He looked to be on the point of further revelation, and then something shifted within him and the window of opportunity slammed shut. Whatever real self I’d been talking to ducked back behind its protective body armor. “Why aren’t you afraid?” he asked, petulant. “I’ve got a gun on you and you act like it’s a water pistol.”
“There’s a high-powered rifle trained on you. You wouldn’t get a step.”
“No, but what good would it do you? You’d think you would be scared. Are you a brave man?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m not going to shoot. And let Albert keep everything? No, I don’t think so. But I think it’s time for me to melt into the shadows. Turn around, start walking back toward your friends.”
“All right.”
“There’s no third man with a rifle. Did you think there was?”
“I wasn’t sure.”
“You knew there wasn’t. That’s all right. You got the girl and we got the money. It all worked out.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t try to follow me.”
“I won’t.”
“No, I know you won’t.”
He didn’t say anything more, and I thought he had slipped away. I kept walking, and when I’d gone a dozen steps he called after me.
“I’m sorry about the fingers,” he said. “It was an accident.”
Chapter 22
“You quiet,” TJ said.
I was driving Kenan’s Buick. As soon as Lucia Landau had reached her father’s side, he had scooped her up in his arms and slung her over his shoulder and hurried back to his car, with Dani and Pavel taking off after him. “I told him not to wait around,” Kenan had said. “Kid needed a doctor. He’s got somebody lives in the neighborhood, guy’ll come to the house.”
So that had left two cars for the four of us, and when we reached them Kenan tossed me the Buick’s keys and said he would ride with his brother. “Come on out to Bay Ridge,” he said. “We’ll send out for pizza or something. Then I’ll run you two home.”
We were stopped at a traffic light when TJ told me I was quiet, and I couldn’t argue with that. Neither of us had said a word since we got in the car. I still hadn’t shaken off the effect of the conversation with Callander. I said something to the effect that our activities had taken a lot out of me.
“You was cool, though,” he said. “Standin’ up there with those dudes.”
“Where were you? We thought you were back at the car.”
He shook his head. “I circled around ’em. Thought maybe I could see this third man, one with the rifle.”
“There wasn’t any third man.”
“Sure made him hard to see. What I did, I made a big circle around ’em and slipped out the place they came in. I found their car.”
“How did you manage that?”
“Wasn’t hard. I seen it before, it was the same Honda again. I backed up against a pole an’ kept an eye on it an’ the dude without no jacket came hurrying out of the graveyard an’ threw a suitcase in the trunk. Then he turned around an’ ran back in again.”
“He was going back for the other suitcase.”
“I know, an’ I thought while he’s gettin’ the second suitcase, I could just take the first one off his hands. Trunk was locked, but I could open it same way he did, pressin’ the release button in the glove compartment. ’Cause the car doors wasn’t locked.”
“I’m glad you didn’t try.”
“Well, I coulda done it, but say he come back and the suitcase ain’t there, what he gonna do? Go back and shoot you, most likely. So I figured that wasn’t too cool.”
“Good thinking.”
“Then I thought, if this here’s a movie, what I do is slip in the back an’ hunker down ‘tween the front an’ back seats. They be puttin’ the money in the trunk an’ sittin’ up front, so they ain’t even gone look in the back. Figured they go back to their house, or wherever they gone go, an’ when we got there I just slip out an’ call you up an’ tell you where I’m at. But then I thought, TJ, this ain’t no movie, an’ you too young to die.”
“I’m glad you figured that out.”
“ ‘Sides, maybe you don’t be at that same number, an’ then what do I do? So I wait, and he come back with the second suitcase, throw it in the trunk, an’ get in the car. An’ the other one, one who made the phone call, he come an’ get behind the wheel. And they drive off, an’ I slip back into the cemetery an’ catch up with everybody. Cemetery’s weird, man. I can see havin’ a stone, tells who’s underneath it, but some of ’em has these little houses an’ all, fancier than they had when they alive. Would you want somethin’ like that?”
“No.”
“Me neither. Just a little stone, don’t say nothin’ on it, but TJ.”
“No dates? No full name?”
He shook his head. “Just TJ,” he said. “An’ maybe my beeper number.”
BACK on Colonial Road, Kenan got on the phone and tried to find a pizza place that was still open. He couldn’t, but it didn’t matter. Nobody was hungry.
“We ought to be celebrating,” he said. “We got the kid back, she’s alive. Some celebration we got here.”
“It’s a draw,” Peter said. “You don’t celebrate a tie score. Nobody wins and nobody shoots off firecrackers. Game ends in a tie, it feels worse than losing.”
“It’d feel a lot worse if the girl was dead,” Kenan said.
“That’s because this isn’t a football game, it’s real. But you still can’t celebrate, babe. The bad guys got away with the money. Does that makes you want to toss your hat in the air?”
“They’re not in the clear,” I put in. “It’ll take a day or two, that’s all. But they’re not going anywhere.”
Still, I didn’t feel like celebrating any more than anybody else did. Like any game that ended in a tie, this one left an aftertaste of missed opportunities. TJ thought he should have stowed away in the back of the Honda, or found some way to follow the car back to where it lived. Peter had had a couple of chances to drop Callander with a rifle shot, times when there would have been no danger to me or to the girl. And I could think of a dozen ways we could have made a try for the money. We’d done what we set out to do, but there should have been a way to do more.
“I want to call Yuri,” Kenan said. “Kid was a mess, she could barely walk. I think she lost more than her fingers.”
“I’m afraid you’re probably right.”
“They must have really done a number on her.” He jabbed at the buttons on the phone. “I don’t like to think about that because then I start thinking of Francey, and—” He broke off to say, “Uh, hello, is Yuri there? I’m sorry. I got the wrong number, I’m really sorry to disturb you.”
He broke the connection and sighed. “Hispanic woman, sounded like I woke her out of a sound sleep. God, I hate when that happens.”
I said, “Wrong numbers.”
“Yeah, I don’t know which is worse, to give or to receive. I feel like such an asshole disturbing somebody like that.”
“You had a couple of wrong numbers the day your wife was kidnapped.”
“Yeah, right. Like an omen, except that they didn’t seem particularly ominous at the time. Just a nuisance.”
“Yuri had a couple of wrong numbers this morning, too.”
“So?” He frowned, then nodded. “Them, you think? Cal
ling to make sure if somebody was home? I suppose, but so what?”
“Would you use a pay phone?” They looked at me, lost. “Say you were going to make a call that would just play as a wrong number. You weren’t going to say anything and nobody would take any notice of the call. Would you bother to drive half a dozen blocks and spend a quarter in a pay phone? Or would you use your own phone?”
“I suppose I’d use my own, but—”
“So would I,” I said. I grabbed my notebook, looking for the sheet of paper Jimmy Hong had given me, the list of calls to the Khoury house. He had copied out all the calls starting at midnight, even though I had only needed the ones from the time of the initial ransom demand. I’d had the slip earlier that day, I’d looked for the laundromat phone number with the intention of calling TJ there, but where the hell had I put it?
I found it, unfolded it. “Here we are,” I said. “Two calls, both under a minute. One at nine-forty-four in the morning, the other at two-thirty in the afternoon. Calling phone is 243-7436.”
“Man,” Kenan said, “I just remember there were a couple of wrong numbers. I don’t know what time they came in.”
“But do you recognize the number?”
“Read it again.” He shook his head. “Doesn’t sound familiar. Why don’t we call it, see what we get?”
He reached for the phone. I covered his hand with mine. “Wait,” I said. “Let’s not give them any warning.”
“Warning of what?”
“That we know where they are.”
“Do we? All we got’s a number.”
TJ said, “Kongs might be home now. Want me to see?”
I shook my head. “I think I can manage this one by myself.” I took the phone, dialed Information. When the operator came on I said, “Policeman requiring directory assistance. My name is Police Officer Alton Simak, my shield number is 2491-1907. What I have is a telephone number and what I need is the name and address that goes with it. Yes, that’s right. 243-7436. Yes. Thank you.”