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  Dansk didn’t say anything. He was wondering if stars emitted noise up there. If there was whistling and crackling in the galaxy or if it was just eerie silence to the end of the universe.

  Loeb sighed. ‘A dead cop, Anthony. For Christ’s sake, why?’

  Dansk felt a weary superiority. Grandmasters probably experienced the same feeling facing some patzer across a chessboard. ‘I took him out of the picture because he was a sympathetic ear Scholes could rely on. Then when she comes in with her story, there’s no Drumm to tell it to. It’s called isolating your target.’

  ‘Isolating your target.’

  ‘Hanging it out exposed.’

  ‘Exposed.’

  ‘You don’t see the strategy here, Loeb. You’re on a whole different wavelength from me.’

  ‘Everybody’s on a whole different wavelength from you.’ Loeb stared at Dansk in silence for a time. ‘You got the tape I sent you. You heard the lady and Drumm discuss a possible connection between Galindez and Isabel and Benny Vialli.’

  ‘Pure fucking speculation,’ Dansk said. He was above all this petty shit.

  ‘Yeah, but dangerous speculation, Anthony. The one plus is she obviously didn’t mention this conversation to the cops, because they never raised it with me.’

  ‘She’s groping, Loeb. She’s playing with mysteries. She’s out of her league.’

  Loeb said, ‘Then your name came up. The cops asked if I’d heard of you.’

  ‘My name was deleted,’ Dansk said.

  Loeb looked morose. ‘Erasing your name from the computers is the easy part, Anthony, but you can’t do the same with people’s memories. The cops ask the lady prosecutor for a description of you and one of their artists comes up with a likeness. Then this picture goes out to such places as the FBI, Justice, the US Marshals Service, and somebody’s going to say, “Hey, I know this guy, a US marshal. Wasn’t he the one took compassionate leave from the Service a coupla years back on the grounds of depression caused by the death of his mother?”’

  ‘My mother?’ Dansk asked, jolted.

  ‘Your mother. Slain by scumbag junkies for the few bucks in her purse. Remember?’

  Scumbag junkies? What was this shit Loeb was talking? The old guy’s marbles were broken and scattered. ‘I talked to my mother on the phone this afternoon. She’s absolutely fine. I never heard her better.’

  ‘You talked to your mother? Is that what you’re telling me? You actually talked to her. Talked? As in held a conversation?’

  ‘Yeah, as in held a conversation.’

  Loeb looked for a while into Dansk’s eyes, then said quietly, ‘Oh, Jesus.’ He shook his head from side to side very slowly.

  ‘What’s your oh-Jesus problem, Loeb?’

  ‘No problem, Anthony. Honestly. I’m glad she’s in good shape. I mean that. I’m happy.’

  He stroked his cheek with a fingertip. He looked past Dansk at the neon sign above the tavern. His expression was contemplative. His face had an unhealthy tangerine glow. ‘It’s over, Anthony.’

  ‘What’s over?’

  ‘This. This work. I’m bringing down the curtain.’

  ‘No way. No goddam way.’

  ‘I can’t let you …’ Loeb smiled at Dansk in a soft sad manner. ‘Look, Scholes has planted a seed and there’s a chance it could grow up to be a plant, and the cops study this plant, and before you know it, it’s got leaves and branches. Suddenly the cops are wondering how to classify it, because it’s not in the usual books.’

  Dansk said, ‘Spare me the horticultural story, Loeb.’

  ‘You kill the prosecutor, I’ll tell you what happens. The plant just bursts into an amazing flower, Anthony, and the gardeners are swarming all around it. They’re analysing the roots, and that’s the last thing we want, because the roots go places we don’t want anyone finding. Kill the prosecutor and the cops are gonna take her story with a whole new level of seriousness.’

  ‘Killing the prosecutor’s the whole goddam point, because she’s gonna keep prying and prying until she finds what she’s looking for. You can’t walk from that fact.’

  Loeb gestured firmly, his hand slicing the air. ‘Covering our tracks is the whole point now. The only point. We shut the book, we burn it and we try to make sure the goddam ashes don’t blow all over the place.’

  ‘The only thing we burn is the fucking woman,’ Dansk said. His voice sounded thundery inside his head. He could hear his mother somewhere in all this ruckus, the mother Loeb said was dead, the mother he’d phoned that afternoon. Loeb was spaced on drugs. The prospect of death had unbalanced him. Sand was running out his egg-timer. A man looking down the tunnel of doom had to have profound difficulties concerning reality. You couldn’t take him at face value, you couldn’t trust anything he said. This story about his conversation with the cops, for instance. It didn’t ring true. It had a counterfeit sound, like he was making some of it up.

  ‘Let it sink in nice and slow,’ Loeb said. ‘We’re shutting down, Anthony. Out of business. Trading conditions are adverse. We’re looking at a whole dismantling operation because it’s not secure any more, it’s not like it used to be. I’m taking it apart brick by brick by brick. No more death. You following me, Anthony?’

  ‘This is my work, Loeb. This is the way I live my life, and you want to close up my shop. You’re out of your mind.’

  ‘The work’s devoured you, Anthony.’ Loeb placed a hand on Dansk’s shoulder, a gesture of comfort Dansk didn’t need. He knocked Loeb’s hand away.

  Loeb said, ‘Look, we accomplished a lot of what we set out to do back in the beginning. Remember that.’

  ‘So it ends here,’ Dansk said. ‘Just like that. Just like that.’

  ‘You’ll be looked after,’ Loeb said. ‘I wouldn’t leave you hanging, you know that.’

  Dansk listened to the voice in his head. Get people to respect you, Anthony. Don’t get pushed around.

  ‘It ends here all right, Loeb, but not for me.’ He reached quickly inside his car, stretched a hand across the framed photograph of Amanda, took the Ruger from the paper sack and turned and fired one shot into Loeb’s forehead. Loeb collapsed slowly, his coat a tent about him. He lay like an old crow with spread wings. Dansk looked down at him. Blood, turned to orange by neon, flowed from Loeb’s face. Dansk thought of juice squeezed out of oranges.

  He got inside his car. Look on the bright side, Ralph, you don’t need morphine now.

  He picked up Amanda’s photograph from the passenger seat and then, with a barely discernible notion of regret for things that might have been in an alternative dimension of dreams, he tossed it out of the window a few miles along the highway. He heard glass shatter and he thought, Goodbye, lady.

  And good night.

  67

  Nightfall and darkness. Amanda sat in the back of the Bronco with Rhees. Rested, more alert, Rhees seemed to have negotiated a very fragile truce with his pain. Up front, Gannon drove with consideration, slowing when he came to bends.

  ‘How you both doing back there?’ he asked.

  Amanda said, ‘Fine,’ but it was a lie, she didn’t feel fine. It wasn’t the fact that Kelloway had taken control of things, although it annoyed her to think of the way she’d been obliged to buckle and step aside. No, this was something else. Pick a safe place, Kelloway had said. Instinctively, she’d jumped at the idea of the pine forest as a secure destination, but now a dismaying sensation the colour of squid-ink was spiralling inside her head.

  She said, ‘Stop.’

  Gannon pulled the vehicle over.

  Rhees asked, ‘Why are we stopping?’

  Amanda looked at his face, then her vision drifted past him towards the empty blacktop. Clouds trailed across an insipid vanilla moon and the desert on either side of the highway was a landscape patched with tiny areas of spangle and shadow.

  ‘The cabin,’ she said.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘I just have a bad feeling.’

  Rhees
said, ‘You think Dansk knows about the place? Even if he does, it’s not easy to find.’

  ‘He probes, John. He’s got the instincts of a psychotic proctologist, and somewhere along the way he finds out we’ve been living in a cabin near Flag.’

  ‘You’re saying he’ll follow us,’ Rhees said.

  ‘He’s driven. He has a relentless streak. He isn’t going to drop this. He isn’t about to let you and me off the hook.’

  Gannon, who had a shotgun balanced against the passenger seat and a Colt .45 in a holster, said, ‘Listen, I only know what Chief Kelloway told me. I drive you both to the cabin and play bodyguard until I hear otherwise. Now you’re saying you don’t want to go there because you’re worried about this guy.’

  Amanda pictured the small rooms of the cabin, but the intimacy of the place had dissolved, the idea of sanctuary had eroded. She was going passively back to the forest, and it was the wrong move. Unless she could somehow turn it to her advantage.

  Traffic appeared on the highway, a cluster of four or five cars, bright lights. She wondered about their occupants. If Dansk was nearby, if he’d tracked her from Phoenix. A cop vehicle wouldn’t deter him, she knew that. He’d consider it a minor nuisance.

  Gannon asked, ‘Is this guy working alone, or are we talking numbers?’

  ‘Including Dansk, three at least,’ she said. ‘There might be more, I don’t know.’

  Gannon said, ‘Nobody’s told me the whole story here, but the buzz I hear is that this Dansk is connected some way to the death of Willie Drumm.’

  ‘Connected some way is right,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t like losing friends,’ Gannon remarked.

  ‘And I don’t like running away from things,’ she said.

  Gannon said, ‘Look, my brief is to guard you. Kelloway never mentioned anything else. Just keep an eye on the pair of you, he said.’

  ‘The Colt .45 and the shotgun, what are they for? You need permission from the bald eagle to use them?’ She listened to her own voice and how bellicose it had become. It was like the voice of a different person.

  Gannon said, ‘If there’s a life-threatening situation, first thing I reach for is my friendly Colt, believe me. I don’t stop to ask permission, Ms Scholes.’

  Rhees shifted his body slightly and said to Amanda, ‘I know what’s running through your mind. You’re wondering if Dansk can be trapped.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said.

  ‘No maybe, Amanda. I know you. You’re wondering if he can be trapped and caught.’

  ‘I don’t like the direction of this,’ Gannon said.

  Amanda said, ‘He killed Willie Drumm, Gannon. Your colleague. Your friend. My friend.’

  ‘My instructions don’t include capturing Dansk or anyone else.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to disobey,’ she said. ‘You just do your job the way Kelloway wants it done. You protect us.’

  ‘I have every intention,’ Gannon said.

  Rhees said, ‘A trap needs bait. What bait are we talking about here?’

  Amanda said, ‘It’s a risk.’

  Rhees looked at her for a long time. He shook his head. ‘No way. Absolutely no way. I don’t want to hear the rest of this. Forget it.’

  ‘Like I said, it’s a risk.’

  Rhees said, ‘No. End of subject.’

  ‘You can’t just make Dansk disappear, John. If Kelloway’s investigating, it could take days, weeks. Even then there’s no guarantee he’s ever going to get to the truth. He’ll be shunted between Justice officials, US Marshals and God knows who else in the Federal machine. This guy Loeb who came from Justice, for instance, he and Dansk come out the same damn pod.’

  Rhees said, ‘We could go somewhere –’

  ‘And hide? I can’t live that way, John. Sorry.’

  Rhees sighed. ‘It’s in the hands of the cops, Amanda. That’s what really riles you. You’ve been decommissioned.’

  ‘No, what riles me is the idea of doing nothing,’ she said. ‘And with respect to Sergeant Gannon, I don’t feel very secure.’

  Dansk’s presence in the pines, his head filled with murderous notions, birds disturbed, wings suddenly fluttering through branches – no, she couldn’t go through with that, waiting and waiting.

  Gannon alone wasn’t enough. She’d need more than Gannon’s shotgun and the Colt in his holster before she could feel remotely secure. ‘Pass me your mobile.’

  Gannon handed her the unit with a little gesture of reluctance.

  Rhees asked, ‘Who do you intend to call?’

  Amanda began to tap numbers. ‘I want Dansk out of our lives, John. I want to hand him over to Kelloway and say, Here, here’s the elusive Dansk for you, Chief. Why don’t you grill him for answers? Why don’t you shine a big bright fucking light in his eyes and make him talk? I just want things back the way they were before.’

  Rhees said, ‘Before? Remind me, Amanda. Refresh my memory.’

  ‘It was a good life and I want it to be good again. It’s that simple.’

  ‘What is it really, Amanda? You feel you have some kind of appointment with Dansk you’re desperate to keep?’

  An appointment with Dansk, that was one way of putting it. But it had to be on her own terms and her own territory. ‘I’m not running from this situation. Somebody else might, but not me.’

  Rhees’s voice was dry and flat and suffused with resignation. ‘It’s all or nothing with you, Amanda. It’s always been that way.’

  ‘You get to a point where you’re sick of fear, and I’ve reached that point, John. I’ve reached it and I’ve outstripped it and I’m tired.’

  She finished punching in the number that would connect her with Kelloway.

  68

  Dansk felt the darkness was fevered in some way. If the night was a human being, it would be running a temperature. He glanced at the Ruger on the passenger seat. The power of a gun. The stunning velocity of a bullet, the implosion of an eye, the demolition of brain tissue, flakes of bone spitting through the back of Loeb’s head into the tangerine light, Morgan Scholes crumpling like an empty grocery bag. Death delivered in an instant. Life and death locked in an ammunition clip locked in a chamber locked in your fist. All that lethal energy. Death compacted and compressed in pointed cylinders.

  You killed Loeb. You killed Morgan Scholes. No inner turmoil, no conflict with your conscience, no great upheaval of the heart. Just point the gun and pull the trigger. Real easy.

  Somewhere far to his right a firework went off. A solitary burst of bright purple light, then a fine spray as the power ebbed out of the thing and it fell to earth. Some kid with a firework he’d probably smuggled back from Mexico. Dansk retained the impression behind his eyes for a few miles, a firefly flutter of powdered light.

  He pulled into a gas station, got out of his car and approached the office. The old guy who appeared in the doorway had a discoloured glass eye. Dansk noticed the fake eye was blue-grey and the white around it viscous, milky.

  ‘’Bout to close up,’ the old guy said. ‘You got me just in time.’ He shuffled out to the pumps and began to fill Dansk’s car. ‘See some eejit set off a firework. You get these drunk kids out in the woods. They don’t think fire hazards. You just passing through?’

  For ever, Dansk thought. He said, ‘Yeah. Passing through.’

  ‘’Bout all Flag’s good for these days, passing through. One time it was different. Air up here used to be sweeter than honey in my day.’ He closed the gas cap.

  Dansk followed the man inside the office, which was also a storeroom. It smelled of grease and rubber and stewed coffee. He spotted a Coke machine that issued soda in glass bottles. He asked for change and inserted enough coins for two bottles. He looked round the place, bought a flashlight, a box of Kleenex, 36 inches of clear plastic tubing, a bottle-opener, a disposable lighter and the largest wrench he could find.

  The old guy rang the items up on his cash register. Dansk paid. Outside, a car idled near the darken
ed pumps, then drove away quickly in a squeal of rubber.

  ‘I guess that’s one fellow decided he don’t need gas,’ the old guy said, ‘or else he’s in an almighty hurry, like everybody else these days.’

  Dansk stepped outside, clutching his purchases, seeing tail-lights glow like cast-off cigarette butts down the highway.

  69

  Inside McTell’s car Pasquale said, ‘I gotta call Loeb, tell him it’s done.’

  ‘You attached it OK?’ McTell asked.

  ‘While Dansk was in the gas station. The thing’s magnetic.’ Pasquale removed his phone from his pocket and dialled Loeb’s number. There wasn’t an answer. He let it ring for a while. ‘Funny, he said he’d wait to hear from me.’

  ‘So he split. Back home probably. It’s no big deal.’

  ‘This whole thing’s gone weird,’ Pasquale remarked.

  ‘You get new orders direct from Loeb, you go through with them. Nothing weird about that.’

  Pasquale sighed. ‘Loeb isn’t a healthy guy, Eddie. I never seen a human look like that since my Uncle Bill on my mother’s side croaked from pneumonia. He’s like this zombie colour.’

  ‘The only colour interests me is money,’ McTell said.

  Pasquale took a thick white envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘Twenty thou in crisp hundreds. Severance pay, Loeb calls it. We get the second instalment afterwards.’

  ‘Yo, May-eee-co,’ said McTell. ‘Arriba arriba!’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Pasquale, ‘it’s gonna be a change.’

  McTell said, ‘I hate Dansk like a tumour in my chest, like a thing I gotta cut out at the root. It’s got to where I can’t hack the sound of his voice even, that little nasal thing he’s got sometimes.’

  ‘Tell you what I hate,’ Pasquale said. ‘This feeling of treachery.’

  ‘You’ll get over it, Bruno. Down in Tijuana the Birthmark Kid’s gonna fade to black.’

  Pasquale said, ‘The thing is, I was inside the Protection Program, sitting in fucking Buffalo and bored outta my skull and just fucking aching for some action, and he rescues me from that meat-packing plant. He pulls me outta that situation and puts me back to my own kinda work. So I still feel I owe him, Eddie.’