by Ian Rankin
Then we waited for Clancy. We waited a long time. At last we gave up and took a cab back to the hotel.
The receptionist remembered something as Bel and I stood waiting for the elevator.
‘Oh, Mr West? Did your friends get in touch?’
‘Sorry?’
‘There were a couple of calls for you yesterday evening. I said you were out.’
‘Did they leave a name?’
‘I’m sorry, sir, they just said you were expecting them to call.’
Well, in a way this was true. I walked back to the desk.
‘We’ll be checking out,’ I said.
She looked surprised. ‘Nothing wrong, I hope?’
‘I’ve got to go back to England. You can see I’ve been in an accident ...’
‘Well, I wasn’t going to say anything, but — ’
‘And the medical costs here are too high. We’re just going up to our room to pack. Could you make up our bill?’
‘Yes, of course.’
The elevator had arrived. I followed Bel into it. She waited till the doors had closed before she asked what was wrong.
‘Everything,’ I said. ‘Someone knows we’re here. It had to happen, we’re just lucky we got this warning.’
We packed quickly. I kept the Colt Commando near the top of my bag, and put the pistol in my waistband. If you see someone in the US with his shirt hanging outside his trousers, think gun.
I paid our bill and the receptionist hoped she’d see us again. I wasn’t laying bets on it as I went outside and found a cab. Only when he’d pulled up to the hotel door did I signal for Bel to come out. We loaded our bags into the boot, as well as a carrier bag belonging to Clancy. Inside it were a camera, film, and a small cassette recorder.
‘Sea Tac?’ our driver asked. But I gave him the address of the car repair shop instead.
We passed close by the hospital and stuck to the main route. But the road ahead was cordoned off, and a police officer was waving traffic on to other streets.
‘Musta been an accident,’ the driver said.
‘Can you pull over?’ I asked him. He did. ‘Wait here, I’ll only be a minute.’ I told Bel to stay put. I think she knew what was going through my mind. She bit her lip but nodded.
I walked back towards the cordon. There were sightseers standing beside it. A car was standing at traffic lights, officials milling around it. An ambulance was there, but mostly I saw people who looked like detectives. Some of them were taking photographs.
The stalled car was our white Trans-Am. There were splashes of blood on the windshield. A sightseer asked what was going on. A veteran at the scene was eager to supply details.
‘A drive-by shooting. Probably pushers, it’s getting as bad here as LA. Guy’s dead. They sprayed him all over the inside of the car. Looks like strawberries in a liquidiser, the cops told me.’
‘Strawberries, huh?’
I walked away with deadened feet. Bel didn’t need to ask. I told the driver there was a change of destination. He took us out on to Aurora until we found a cheap motel with a red-neon vacancy.
It reminded me of the first motel we’d stayed in after buying the Trans-Am: gaudy colours and infrequent maid-service. I went out to the ice machine while Bel unwrapped the ‘sanitised’ plastic tumblers she’d found in the bathroom. We drank tequila. Bel finished her second one before collapsing on the bed in tears. I stood at the window and looked out through the slats in the blind. I’d specified a room round the back of the motel, not sure how much safer this made things. My view through the window was of the parking area, strewn with litter, and behind it a narrow street with junkyard housing, hardly meriting the description ‘bungalows’.
‘What do we do now?’ she said.
‘Same as we would have done,’ I replied. ‘Only now we know they’re close to us. Forewarned is forearmed.’
‘Yes, and cleanliness is next to godliness. It doesn’t mean anything, Michael.’
‘Bel.’ I went to the bed and pulled her up, hugging her close. I ran my hands down her hair. I kissed her wet cheeks. I didn’t know how long we’d be safe in this motel. A couple of days maybe, but it could be less. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of motels on Aurora. But I was sure Kline or his men would search each one. The quicker we went to work the better.
‘Stay here,’ I said. ‘Switch the TV on. They’ve got HBO.’
‘I don’t want HBO! I want this to end!’
‘Bel, it’s ending, believe me.’ I just didn’t trust myself to script the finale.
I did something not many people do on Aurora. I walked. There wasn’t much in the way of pavement, and the drivers looked at me like I was roadkill. I didn’t have far to walk though. Our motel hadn’t been entirely chosen at random. It happened to be close to half a dozen used-car lots. I walked into the first one and browsed. There were some serious cars here, highly-polished numbers from the 50s and early-60s, all chrome and fin and leather. But I wanted something a lot more prosaic. Most important of all, I wanted local plates. We needed to merge with the scenery.
‘Hi, can I help you?’
He was exactly what you’d expect: ill-chosen clothes and a grinning cigar. He walked with splayed feet and was shaped like a rugby ball: all stomach, tapering off top and bottom. I asked about a couple of the cars, and said I might be back. I also told him I’d be paying cash.
The next lot I tried was full of dodgems, not a roadworthy car in the place. They had a good mechanic though. He’d done a few tricks to make the cars look and sound nice. You had to study the trick twice or even three times to see how he’d done it. The Americans have a love affair with their cars, as a result of which there are a million products on the market for the home mechanic. You can pour gunk into your car which will temporarily stop an oil leak, or make the engine sound smoother, or stop the thing sounding like a cancer patient. They weren’t even remission, these cures. They were quack.
The next place along had some nice newer models. There was a Volvo I liked the look of, and an older Mercedes. A Ford Mustang was an expensive option I toyed with for a couple of minutes, but then I saw the VW Camper. I knew it was by no means perfect. It wouldn’t outrun a bicycle, was slow on hills, and was noisy. In its favour, we could get out of town and sleep in it instead. The guy was asking $4,000 for it, but when we had trouble sliding open the side door, he came down to three and a half. I studied the engine. It had been twin-carbed, and not by an expert. I told him I didn’t want anything twin-carbed.
‘Brings the life span and the resale down.’
I walked away from the vehicle, then turned and looked at it again, ready to banish it from my thoughts.
‘Oh, did I mention I’d be paying cash?’
He came down to three and told me he was cutting his throat.
‘Just don’t splash blood on the hubcaps,’ I said. I shouldn’t have: it made me flash back to the Trans-Am and Sam Clancy’s death.
We settled the paperwork and I drove out of the lot. The steering felt slack, but not too slack to be fatal. The indicators weren’t working either, so I didn’t make many friends crossing the traffic into the motel. I parked right outside our room. Bel was standing at the door, hugging herself, bouncing on her toes. I didn’t imagine the sight of the VW had got her so excited.
‘He’s alive!’ she said. I got her inside and shut the door.
‘What?’
‘He’s okay, he’s not dead. It was on the TV news.’
I sat down on the bed. ‘Clancy?’ I said. She nodded, biting back tears. We watched the TV together in silence, holding hands. It took a while till we got another news bulletin. There was a reporter at the hospital.
‘That’s the same hospital I went to.’
The reporter said that the driver of the vehicle, Sam Clancy, a local journalist who had been in hiding after what he claimed at the time were attempts on his life, had been shot four or five times, once in the head, once in the neck, and at least twice in the
shoulder. He was in a stable condition, but was still unconscious. Police were at his bedside and were on armed guard outside his room.
‘I’ll be damned,’ I said.
There was an interview with a senior police officer. They asked him about the previous attempts on Sam Clancy’s life, but the cop had nothing to say at this juncture. Then they spoke to Sam’s editor and to a colleague. It could have been the man I spoke with the first time I phoned the paper. And finally they showed pictures of the Trans-Am and the repair shop.
‘Shit.’
So they would have talked to the owner, who would tell them that it wasn’t Sam Clancy’s car, no sir, it belonged to a couple of English friends of his ... Which would set the police wondering: where were those friends now? And if they were really clever, or really lucky, they’d connect Sam and his friends with the late-night disappearance of three people, one of them injured, from a campground near where a man had died.
Bel saw it all too, of course, and she squeezed my hand all the tighter.
‘We’ve got to move,’ she said. ‘Before this starts falling around our heads.’
I nodded slowly, and she smiled at me. ‘He’s alive, Michael. He’s alive.’ We hugged one another, then I pulled her off the bed. ‘Come on, places to go, people to see.’
‘By the way,’ she said, ‘what were you doing in that rattle-wagon?’
That rattle-wagon took us back over to Bremerton and into the Olympic Peninsula. The gearbox had a habit of springing back into neutral, but apart from that there were no problems. The van didn’t have air conditioning of course, or a radio. But Bel lolled in the back and opened all the little cupboards and took the cover off the sink, and seemed to like it well enough in the end. It was true there wasn’t anywhere to park on the road along Hood Canal. I suppose they’d done it on purpose so tourists wouldn’t stop and gawp at the nice houses. However, you couldn’t always see the house from the driveway, and vice versa, so I stopped in a driveway across the road from Nathan’s house and a couple of houses down. Effectively, I was blocking the access, but the only people likely to complain were the occupants of the house, and they might never know. Clancy had pointed out that a lot of the homes here were used only at weekends and vacation time. I went round the back of the VW and propped open the engine, so we could claim mechanical trouble if anyone asked us. I’d tell them we were waiting for the triple-A.
We seemed to sit in the van for a long time. We hadn’t brought anything with us, nothing to eat or drink or read. Bel found a pack of cards in the glove compartment, but there were only thirty-three of them. She found a few other bits and pieces too. A soiled dollar bill, a cushion-cover, the whistle from a steam-kettle, an unused stick of Wrigley’s, and a bicycle pump.
‘If we had a boot,’ she said, ‘we could have a car-boot sale.’
‘Hey, come and look at this.’ She came forward and peered through the windscreen. A car was coming out of Nathan’s drive. It hadn’t been there earlier when we’d passed, so must have been parked in the garage. It was smart, long at the front and squat at the back. I guessed it to be a Buick sedan. We’d seen enough cars on the road to make us expert.
‘It’s a Lincoln,’ Bel said.
‘Is it?’
As it passed our drive, I caught a glimpse of the figure in the back. All I could make out was platinum hair and a suit, but by this time that was enough.
‘You want to break into the house?’ Bel asked.
I’d been thinking this over, and now I shook my head. ‘The house is just a meeting place. I don’t think we’d find anything there.’
‘So what now?’
‘Now,’ I said, ‘we follow Kline. Here, you drive.’
‘What?’ We started to change places.
‘He doesn’t know you,’ I said. ‘At least, he hasn’t met you. If we’re going to tail him, it better be you in the front seat and me in the back.’
‘He saw me when I got out of the car that time outside Oban.’
‘He didn’t see much more than the back of your head. Besides, you weren’t wearing sunglasses then.’
Bel squeezed into the driver’s seat. ‘He’s probably halfway to Seattle by now.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I think I know where he’s headed.’
The problem was the ferry, or it could have been. But we stayed in the van, sitting in the back, pretending to play cards with our incomplete pack. ‘Snap,’ Bel said. We didn’t look up much from the table, just in case Kline happened to stroll past and glance in. To the outside world, we must have appeared as engrossed as any poker fiends. We needn’t have worried. Kline’s sedan was in a different line, and about eight vehicles ahead of us. He stayed in his car, while his driver went for a smoke on-deck. I saw the driver very briefly, and recognised him as the same man who’d been driving for Kline that day in Oban.
We followed them off the boat, but lost them on the steep streets up near the Seattle Centre. It didn’t matter. I directed Bel up into Queen Anne and then over to the big houses off Bigelow. The second street we tried was the right one.
‘How’s the handbrake?’ Bel asked as she parked roadside.
‘I haven’t needed it yet,’ I answered.
Jeremiah Provost’s house boasted a cellar garage with a slope running down to it from the pavement. This was where Kline’s car was parked, its nose almost touching the garage’s closed door. Bel had taken us a bit further down the hill, which was fine. We couldn’t afford to be obvious; it was still daylight. But I decided to take one risk anyway.
‘Stay here,’ I said.
‘That’s what you always say.’
‘This time I mean it.’ I left the van and stuck my hands in my pockets, whistling like a regular Joe on his way home from work. I climbed back up the hill and passed Kline’s car. Bel had been right, it was a Lincoln. I didn’t suppose the licence would help me, but I memorised it anyway. I passed the path which led around to the side of the house. I looked up and down the street, but there was no one about, no one to see me dive into the shrubbery and begin crawling my way around to the front door. Clancy had mentioned night-lights, but this was still daytime. I was hoping the system would only work at night.
I could hear voices, and slowed my pace accordingly. I could hear Kline’s voice, then another man’s. It seemed, amazingly, that they were holding a conversation — and a heated one at that — on Provost’s doorstep. I could hear snatches. Kline kept his voice low, the other voice was the angry one.
‘I told you not to come back here! You never did listen, did you?’ This was the other voice talking.
Then I found myself nose to a prickly bush, and looking through its foliage across a postage stamp lawn to the open front door. A man stood in the doorway, looking down on to where Kline and his driver stood. The driver had his hands behind his back. Kline stood with hands in pockets, head bowed. He started to make a speech I couldn’t hear. Above the three men, I could see a lamp high on the wall of the house. It was pointing in my direction and it was on. I must have triggered a beam. I prayed they wouldn’t look up and see it. There was no point worrying anyway.
So instead I concentrated on Jeremiah Provost.
It was my first sight of him, and he was impressive in a mad professor sort of way. He looked like he’d gained weight since the most recent newspaper photos. His beard was longer and greyer, his frizzy hair swept back and out from his forehead, like he had electricity searing through him. He was wearing denims and a T-shirt and an old cardigan. There was a strand of thick round beads around his neck, and he touched them as he spoke. His stance made it clear he had no intention of letting Kline over the threshold.
That was the most puzzling thing of all.
Kline’s speech over, Provost looked to the sky for guidance. ‘Look,’ he said, his voice an educated drawl, ‘just stay the fuck away, okay? Is that too much to ask?’
More undertones from Kline.
‘I know he’s dead,’ Provost s
narled. He meant Nathan. Nathan’s gory end still hadn’t been on any news I’d seen. No doubt Kline and his men had been busy covering it up. Provost was still talking. ‘As yet,’ he said, ‘we don’t know anything other than that he is dead. What’re you saying?’
I almost whistled: Provost didn’t know the connection between Kline and Nathan. I even felt a moment’s pity for Kline, who had just lost a brother. Then I smiled to myself.
The light overhead was still on. I wondered what kind of timer it had. And I thanked God it wasn’t wired into any alarm. There was a camera, but it was aimed at the path, just in front of the main door. Kline was shuffling his feet. He said a few more words, then turned to go.
‘Yeah,’ said Provost, ‘and don’t forget to take your fucking gorilla with you.’ I could see the gorilla clench his fists behind his back. Oh boy, he wanted to swipe Provost. But all he did was give him the surreptitious finger instead.
I waited till they’d gone and Provost had closed and locked his door, then worked my way around the rest of the perimeter towards where the shrubbery ended just before the swimming pool. ‘Swimming pool’ was actually stretching things; it was more an outsized bath. The French windows were open, curtains wafting through them. There was a big white open-plan living area, and a dumpy woman standing in the middle of the floor. She was stroking Provost’s hair and kissing his neck, whispering to him. I squinted against the glare from the sinking sun. On the other side of the house, I could hear Kline’s car pull back on to the street and drive off. The woman had long lifeless hair and was wearing a floaty kaftan which caught the breeze from the French windows. I guessed she might be Alisha. She stepped back from Provost, who was rubbing his hands over his face, a man carrying the weight of the world. He started flapping his arms, shouting something, near to frenzy or madness or something.
‘What’s on your mind, Jerry?’ I said to myself, hoping he might yell out an answer.
But instead the woman hiked the kaftan over her head and let it fall to the floor. She was naked underneath. It wasn’t a bad move. Provost stopped fretting and started looking. There was a lot to look at, including a wondrously large pair of breasts. He walked forward to meet her, and she took his head and rested it against her. He seemed like a child then, as she spoke quietly to him and stroked his hair and soothed him. When he broke away from her long enough to start taking off his own clothes, I back-pedalled through the shrubbery and on to the street.
