Silencer Page 23

‘I think we’ll rip off the wheelchair,’ Amanda said.

  ‘I’ll fold it for you,’ the orderly said. He collapsed the chair and placed it behind the front seats.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Amanda asked.

  ‘My earth name’s Jonas.’

  ‘Jonas, I owe you.’

  ‘Consider me an agent of justice,’ he said.

  She got behind the wheel and slammed the car into the great bright vacuum of the day, tall date palms whipping past in a blue-green blur, groves of citrus trees flaring under the withering masonic eye of the sun.

  ‘I don’t recognize the car,’ Rhees said.

  ‘It’s another story, John.’

  He sat with his head against the back of his seat. ‘It’s going to get worse,’ he said.

  She wasn’t sure if he was referring to the heat or his pain or something else altogether.

  54

  Willie Drumm waited outside the shopping mall. He drank coffee from a cardboard cup and checked his watch every so often. He was a patient man by nature, but this situation was beginning to test him. The message on his desk had read, ‘Meet Amanda Scholes, Metrocenter, 11 a.m.’ It had been received by a young cop called Lazarus, whom Drumm barely knew. Lazarus had gone off-duty, so Drumm hadn’t been able to question him about the message. Had it come directly from Amanda? How had she sounded? Did she say anything else?

  It was eleven-twenty now. He wondered how much longer he should give her. She’d always been a stickler for punctuality, at least when he’d worked with her. Her resignation had created a void in his life. He’d enjoyed the regular leisure hours they’d spent drinking, chatting, talking cases, crimes, the state of the nation.

  He wandered up and down, scanning the parking-lot. It was packed with cars, people hurrying out of the sun and inside the mall as if this was the last shopping day in the history of the universe.

  He realized he was hungry. Inside, you could get pizza, kebabs, stir-fry, anything you liked except it was all indigestible. He didn’t want to go in and grab a sandwich because he didn’t want to run the risk of missing Amanda when she showed up. He didn’t like these consumer malls anyway. He preferred corner grocery stores and small family operations, when you could find them these days.

  He strolled up and down. He’d give Amanda five more minutes then he’d call in and check his messages. She might have cancelled. He tapped the face of his watch.

  This wasn’t his day so far. He’d gone to the Carlton only to find that Anthony Dansk had checked out fifteen minutes before. No forwarding address, and now here he was waiting for Amanda.

  She’d said she was on her way to visit Rhees, and that he should telephone her at the hospital after he’d seen Dansk. Maybe her plans had changed for some reason – hence the message, maybe she’d been delayed somewhere. He took the mobile phone from his pocket. He couldn’t stand these things, they made him feel like a late-blooming yuppie. He didn’t like electronic doodahs. Computers and modems and e-mail and all the rest of it were beyond him. Another world altogether.

  Drumm punched the buttons and got himself connected to Betty Friedman.

  ‘Finally,’ she said.

  ‘Why? You been looking for me?’

  ‘Your friend Amanda called. Says it’s urgent you get back to her.’

  Drumm had an odd little feeling: somebody walking on his grave.

  ‘She’s at the Valley of the Sun Memorial. Got a pen, I hope?’

  ‘I got a pen.’ Drumm went through the pockets of his jacket and found a toothmarked stub of pencil attached to a frayed loop on his notebook.

  Betty Friedman read him the number and the extension. He wrote it down.

  ‘When did she phone?’ he asked.

  ‘About half an hour ago.’

  ‘She sound OK?’

  ‘Odd you should ask. She doesn’t know anything about this meeting with you. It was news to her.’

  ‘She didn’t know about our appointment?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘That’s weird.’ More than weird, he thought. He had a prickling sensation in his bad leg.

  ‘Call her. You’re supposed to be in the business of clearing up mysteries, right?’

  Drumm hung up. He dialled the number of the hospital. It was a while before anyone answered. You wouldn’t want to be in the throes of cardiac arrest, gasping your last. Eventually an operator came on the line and Drumm asked for the extension number. It rang unanswered.

  The operator broke in and said, ‘That number doesn’t reply.’

  Drumm hung up and called Betty Friedman back. ‘You sure you gave me the correct extension?’

  ‘I told you what Amanda Scholes told me, Willie. Extension three eight nine eight. You probably wrote it down wrong.’

  Drumm checked his notebook. No, he’d written 3898 exactly the way Friedman had given it to him. He dialled the hospital again – the switchboard took a long time to pick up this time too – and repeated the number. There was still no answer. Baffled and irritated, he called Betty Friedman yet again.

  ‘I’m still getting no response from that number,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe the room’s empty. She might have checked Rhees out.’

  ‘He didn’t look like a guy who was going anywhere when I saw him yesterday. I ought to get over to the hospital.’

  ‘Willie, a moment’s logical thought, huh?’

  Drumm said, ‘You’re gonna tell me what to do. I can hear it coming, Betty.’

  ‘A suggestion is all. She’s bound to call here sooner or later, so it makes sense for you to come back to the office instead of wandering around a hospital she may have already left. At least you’ll be here to take the call, right?’

  ‘I hate sensible,’ Drumm said.

  ‘Men always do. See you.’

  Drumm hung up the phone. Funny about that message. If Amanda didn’t know about it, where the hell had it originated? But this whole business was funny, beginning with Dansk. Dead witnesses. A protection program that didn’t protect. A mother worrying about her kid.

  He tucked the phone away, scanned the parking-lot and tried to remember where he’d left his car.

  55

  Dansk said into his phone, ‘Give her bonus points for trying.’

  McTell, driving behind, said, ‘I guess.’

  Dansk leaned forward against the wheel and watched the small yellow Ford ahead. He thought, She knows I’m behind her. She knows I’m in the vicinity. She might pull some utterly predictable stunt, like a sudden U-turn, but she’d have to dig deep inside her box of tricks to shake me off now. And it isn’t going to be easy with the invalid on board. Rhees isn’t exactly flexible.

  When she’d roared from the rear of the hospital, McTell had picked up on her and Dansk had slipped in behind McTell. Sometimes he’d overtake Eddie, other times he’d let him lead. Alternating strategy.

  ‘I’m enjoying this,’ he said to McTell.

  McTell’s words floated on a ragged cushion of interference. ‘This what?’

  ‘This. This whole thing. Everything. The way you flushed her and Rhees out.’ Dansk took the shooter out of the paper sack and laid it in his lap, fingering it with one hand. The day was vibrant all around him, a shade too bright, like a soap opera on Mexican TV, but he had a charge of exuberance going.

  ‘This Ruger’s sweet,’ he said.

  ‘You really sure how to handle it?’ McTell asked.

  ‘I didn’t spend five years with the US Marshals making paper-clip chains,’ Dansk said.

  ‘Five years,’ McTell said.

  ‘Five years. I even represented DC Metro in a target-shooting competition in 1992, and came second.’

  Inside his car, McTell thinks how little he knows about Dansk’s history. Like he gives a shit anyhow. Dansk presses buzzers and you jump, end of story. He wants a gun, so he gets a gun. He always gets what he wants. McTell would have done it differently: straight inside the hospital, big fat silencer screwed on, perform the surgery fast a
nd beat it outta this place where sunstroke was always 2 or 3 degrees away. But no, Dansk has to get intricate. Dansk has this game he’s playing with this woman, he wants her to run and sweat and squirm through hoops. But sometimes you could cut somebody too much slack and then you had a major problem reining them back in.

  What is it with Dansk? This business of flushing the man and woman out. He’d never mentioned that was his purpose. Just go in, McTell, check the room, carry flowers. But Dansk is devious. And why? Because he wants to do the surgery himself! He wants to pull the trigger, thinks he’s got what it takes for the job. Doesn’t want to do it inside the hospital, has some other place of execution in mind. Let it go. This is the Anthony Dansk Show. He’s the star and you’re just Eddie McTell, warm-up comedian.

  McTell said, ‘If I was her, I’d head for the nearest precinct house and tell them I’m afraid for my life.’

  ‘I’d do the same thing myself,’ Dansk said.

  ‘And this, like, don’t worry you?’

  ‘You don’t see it, Eddie. You think if she wanders in off the street and pours out her yarn to some hard-assed cops, they’ll sit around hanging on her every word? They’ll listen, oh sure, because she used to be connected, but they’ll be tapping their pencils slowly on their desks and thinking this lady’s turned into a class-one conspiracy freak, this one’s all the way from Woo-Woo Central. What a sad sight, emotionally unbalanced by recent events. Boyfriend battered and that poor Sanchez woman God knows where. She doesn’t have a goddam thing to back up any suspicions she has. It’s beayoo-tiful. So let her strut inside some precinct house and say what she likes. Here’s a news flash for you, McTell, sooner or later, she’s gonna have to come out again.’

  And I know where she’ll go then, he thought, because I know what I’d do in her position. I’m scanning you, Amanda. It was like being twinned in some way, a bizarre kind of affinity, an intimacy. Like two lovers kept apart by fate and time.

  ‘Drumm’ll listen to her,’ McTell said.

  ‘Drumm, sure. Drumm’ll listen. Right. He’s Mr Empathy.’ Dansk laughed, cut the connection and focussed on the Ford that glowed bright yellow in the sun. He imagined Amanda’s hands sticky on the steering-wheel. Your nerves are puppy dogs in a canvas bag on the way to the river to be drowned, sweetheart. You’re running and running. You and your invalid lover running to see good old Willie Drumm for sympathy.

  Sympathy. Right.

  Ahead, the Ford was turning towards downtown.

  56

  Through the windshield of his car, Pasquale watched the cop cross the parking-lot of the shopping mall. The guy had a slight limp. He was hurrying in an odd hip-hop fashion.

  Pasquale drove slowly in the cop’s general direction, then braked. The cop vanished between a line of parked cars a moment and Pasquale, tapping his fingers on the wheel, waited for the guy to step back out into full view. He didn’t like this situation, this waiting, all these shoppers going about their business. Waiting frayed his edges.

  The cop re-emerged between a parked camper with a bumper-sticker saying DIVERS DO IT DEEPER, and a flashy new pick-up truck painted in blue and burgundy streaks. Pasquale remembered he’d had a bumper-sticker one time with Bruce Springsteen’s face on it and an electric guitar. An old Camaro he’d owned when he was nineteen. Nice car. Babes liked it. Not like this one he was presently driving. This car was a total fuck-me embarrassment. It wasn’t the kind of thing he’d want acquaintances to see him cruise around in.

  He watched the cop pat the pockets of his jacket like he was looking for something. Shoppers walked in front of the car. One little kid stared at him and made a face, poking his ugly nose out of shape with a middle finger and pulling down the flesh under both eyes.

  Pasquale rolled the window down. ‘Your face’ll stay that way, asshole.’

  The kid flipped him a finger, then skipped away. Brat. Pasquale revved the engine. The cop was in open space, a bunch of keys in his hand, and Pasquale pressed his foot down on the gas pedal.

  Go. This is your best chance.

  The cop seemed oblivious to the car. He was elsewhere, wrapped up in his thoughts.

  One hit, Pasquale thought.

  He was a couple of hundred feet from the cop, who was still unaware of the car bearing down on him. It’s gonna be one of those last second things, Pasquale thought, the cop raising his face just before impact, fear and surprise thundering through him when it was too late to take evasive action.

  Pasquale floored the gas pedal.

  The cop turned. His face had a stricken look, like this was all some kind of mistake or a sequence in a very bad dream.

  You’re not dreaming, buster.

  The car struck the cop and tossed him in the air, and Pasquale felt the crack of impact and saw the guy tossed to one side, plaid jacket open and flapping in a draught of air, glittering coins falling from his pockets, a clutch of keys seeming to hang like a small silver kite.

  In his rear-view mirror Pasquale saw the cop land on his side and roll over and then – holy shit! – he was raising himself up on one knee. His jacket was covered in blood and he was shaking his head in a dazed, pained way, clutching his arm, which had to be broken because it was bent at a weird angle, and his mouth hung open and contorted.

  A fuck-up, Pasquale thought. Big time. He stuck the car into reverse. No other way to do this, Bruno. He tightened his grip on the wheel and zoomed backwards fast, before the cop had a chance to react, and he heard the crunch of the rear wheels against the cop’s body and the car rose a foot, suspension swaying, exhaust discolouring the air. He kept backing up, and then when he’d driven the front wheels over the cop he stuck the gear into first and rolled quickly over the guy again.

  He looked in the rear-view mirror.

  The cop wasn’t moving now. He was lying there in sunlight and blood.

  Pasquale hammered the car forwards and screeched across the lot and out into the street. It was two miles before he felt he’d covered enough distance from the shopping mall and it was safe to pull over. He parked in a street of tract homes and sat motionless, his breathing heavy.

  He noticed a streak of blood on the lower right-hand corner of his windshield, a dark smear already drying in the hot air, and when his phone began to ring he let it go unanswered for a time, because it could only be Dansk checking how things had gone. Dansk, always Dansk.

  He picked it up on the tenth ring.

  It wasn’t Dansk and it wasn’t McTell.

  It was a guy he’d never heard before, a guy with a deep cracked voice and a wild hack of a cough.

  57

  Stuffy inside the Ford, Rhees in pain, eyes shut, lids fluttering every now and again. Sometimes he’d lick his dry lips and try to dig out a small smile from a place far inside.

  Amanda said, ‘I’ll stop someplace, pick up some aspirin. They might help ease the pain.’

  ‘I’m more in a morphine mood,’ Rhees said. ‘Forget the aspirin. Don’t stop, just keep going.’

  She looked in rear-view and wing mirrors, but it was the old story: you needed to know what you were looking for before you spotted it, unless it was obvious, like the car that had tailed her a little too close along Lincoln Boulevard. But here traffic was glutted and cluttered and you couldn’t single anything out.

  A pick-up swerved directly in front of her and she wondered if the movement was designed to impede her. She changed lanes to avoid any possibility of impact, but the truck – booming hard-core Nashville, driver in a stetson with a long bright feather in the hatband – gathered speed and went past her and a Pabst beer can was tossed languidly from the cab. She imagined Dansk’s disapproval: the world’s a mess, the ozone layer’s disappearing and the oceans are dying.

  And so are people, she thought. Disappearing and dying, and not just because of harmful rays or seafood spiked with mercury.

  She rolled down her window, lit a cigarette, then remembered what Dansk had said about smoking during their first meeting in
the Biltmore. What people inflict on their bodies is their own business. They want to take serious risks, let them. She realized now he wasn’t just passing a casual opinion on the perils of tobacco, he had in mind other kinds of risks more immediate than the long-term effects of cigarettes.

  Rhees turned his face towards her. ‘Doesn’t it strike you that the guy with the flowers had the perfect opportunity in the hospital? You and me together in the room. All he had to do was shut the door, whip out a pistol. Why didn’t he?’

  She looked at Rhees. ‘My guess is it’s something Dansk wants to do himself.’ And she wondered why she hadn’t tried to plunge the knife into Dansk’s goddam heart last night, why she hadn’t at least attempted that last act. Because he was strong and would have disarmed her easily, because even with the knife in her hand she was afraid of him, just as she was afraid of him now.

  She gave the car more gas, cutting in and out of the traffic flow. She headed south, neglecting the futile mirror checks now. Fear reduced everything to driving, just driving, concentrating on the distant towers, the heart of the city. The few clouds that drifted on the blue horizon were like smoke left by old cannon-fire.

  Rhees asked, ‘Are we close yet?’

  ‘A few blocks.’ Seventh Avenue and Washington, that was the place. Not far now, she’d see it any moment: the big beige building, patrol cars parked outside, cops coming and going. She’d park at the front and she’d ask a cop to help her get Rhees out of the car and into the wheelchair and she’d wheel him inside, and if Drumm wasn’t there she’d ask for Betty Friedman. She had this much planned. Thinking your movements through brought an illusion of control.

  She saw a clutter of cruisers, a few cops talking together and laughing, a hive of law-enforcement activity. Guns and protection, the safest place she could imagine. She parked the Ford as close to the building as she could, a no-parking zone, then she opened the door and stepped out. Her clothes stuck to her. She ran a hand through her damp hair.

  She looked at the entrance to the building, saw the huge circular concrete flowerpots designed to prevent motorized assaults by madmen on the front doors, then lowered her face to check on Rhees, who was gazing at her listlessly. The line of her vision was drawn away from him and up, up over the roof of the Ford to the other side of the street, where she saw Dansk pass slowly in a car, wearing dark glasses and grinning at her, his hand hanging arrogantly from the open window, as if he were no more than a tourist driving idly through town, with nothing more than time to kill.