Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  Guinness wouldn’t have minded getting back to his motel room and putting this day to rest; a few hours of sleep, he knew, would put all its attendant horrors behind him, but right then they felt as if they might take up permanent residence. First Kathleen slamming the door in his face, then an hour of polite chatting with that husband of hers, and now this business with Willie Trowbridge. The late Willie Trowbridge.

  The stuff was supposed to be perfectly painless, but you must feel something. Willie had looked so surprised when, at the last possible moment, it seemed to come to him that he was dying. The beer was drunk and the cigarette almost finished, and you could watch him winding down, moving and speaking more and more slowly as gradually the central nervous system got the message that it was all over. And then that funny startled expression, and the last attempt to make some articulate sound—perhaps to ask a question, to inquire what the hell had been done to him—and then the gradual slide down to a prone position on the living room carpet, as the muscles relaxed and gave up their struggle.

  He would look fine when they found him, all the bruises in the proper places and all made while he was still technically alive so that they would have the proper authentic appearance. It would be accepted by everyone concerned, even by Willie’s employers, whom he had wronged in the last minutes of his earthly journey, as a natural death.

  It was one of those little awkwardnesses, the man you kill simply because it is necessary—not for anything he did, but because he might get in the way. It really wasn’t very nice; it didn’t do much for your self esteem to dump some poor hood in a running tub of lukewarm water and hold his head under until he drowned. It wasn’t very nice at all.

  But so what? Guinness could live with it; he had done worse things and had lived with them, and Willie Trowbridge was, after all, part of that which had threatened his only child. The Willie Trowbridges of this world, like the housefly, would always be with us, but Guinness’s little girl was a unique product—there would not likely be another. So it was just too damned bad about Willie Trowbridge, who had been a grown man and who had had to take his chances with everyone else. Rocky Guinness, under whatever name she traveled now, was nine years old, and it was open season on all those who would do her harm.

  6

  “I want to know why you’ve come back.”

  It was the very first thing she said, the first time he had heard her voice in eight years. So he restrained himself from pointing out that he hadn’t “come back.” They were meeting again on neutral ground and neither of them had come there on account of the other.

  But he knew well enough what she meant.

  Kathleen had been waiting for him, oh, for hours. Her station wagon was backed into a space on the other side of the parking lot from his motel room door, well out of the light from the covered walkway that ran in front. Probably she had some idea of concealment; any woman would, between the bad guys who might be lurking anywhere and a husband whose views on the subject of nocturnal visits to strange men might be no end of tiresome. And then, she might have wanted that little advantage in a first contact after so long. She might want to think that even at the last minute she could simply say nothing and withdraw unnoticed. However, it hadn’t worked that way. Guinness had spotted her even before he had finished making the turn around to his own side of the building.

  He parked in his usual space and sat behind the wheel for a moment, wondering if this might not be some kind of a setup. But no, not here. Not in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn. He was supposed to be a deputy inspector in the FBI, and nobody was going to bring down on himself the kind of heat you get for ambushing a federal agent.

  And, besides, who would know enough to use Kathleen as the bait? Nobody except Kathleen herself. That was just too ugly a thought.

  He got out of his car and walked the twenty or so steps to hers, thinking that if she wanted him dead he wasn’t going to argue with her about it.

  But he was still alive when his fingers touched the door handle on the passenger’s side—that was the great disadvantage of his line of work; it led to all manner of morbid fancies—and so he opened the door and slid onto the seat next to her.

  There was a long silence between them, which he felt little inclined to break. After all, she had come to him, so let her state her business and be done with it. He had said his piece that morning and was inclined to let it rest there.

  “I want to know why you’ve come back,” she repeated.

  Guinness continued to inspect the inside corner of his left thumb, not answering, not even sure that he could answer. And then suddenly he was angry, and his anger was tangible in the quietness of his voice.

  “I think I told you, but I’ll say it again. I came to help, Katey. You shouldn’t have shut the door in my face; I might just decide to go away and let you untangle this one all by yourself.”

  They were both angry now.

  Guinness had almost decided to terminate the whole idiotic interview when he saw something stir slightly in the darkness behind him and looked back over his shoulder.

  But it wasn’t an assassin. It was merely their daughter, asleep under a blanket on the rear seat. He checked his watch. It was a few minutes after eleven.

  “You brought her along?”

  “Well, I don’t need any help from you!”

  She seemed to have forgotten about her child, or perhaps she simply chose to ignore his question as an impertinence. After all, what right did he have to question anything? Hadn’t she had to raise this child without him? Hadn’t he forfeited any rights in the matter by his absence? It certainly would seem so from the way she glared at him.

  “You don’t know what you need,” he said. “And anyway, I’m not really interested in bailing out either you or your husband; my only stake in this business is Rocky, and if you think I plan to leave our daughter to the protection of that slicked-up glad hander you married then you never knew me very well.”

  What had he expected, that she would rise to her husband’s defense? At any rate, she didn’t. He didn’t know whether he was glad or not; he didn’t know what to make of Kathleen voluntarily taking a schmuck like this Duelle to her bed, and maybe neither did she. Maybe that was the meaning of her silence. Or maybe that was only what Guinness preferred to think.

  “Where the hell is your bright eyed boy, anyway? You wouldn’t be dragging Rocky along with you if he were at home to watch her. You wouldn’t be here yourself.”

  Guinness looked closely into her face, but it might as well have been cast in bronze.

  “No, you wouldn’t be here; kindly old Dr. Duelle probably wouldn’t like it very much if he knew, would he? Just where is your lord and master at this precise moment?”

  She started to reach for the keys, but he was there ahead of her. He took them out of the ignition and dropped them into his pocket, and as she made a grab at trying to get them back he caught her forearm, twisting it slightly to one side so she would feel the strain and know that he could break it like a rotten twig anytime he felt like it.

  “I’ll ask you again, Katey. Where is he?”

  She didn’t try to pull herself loose—she wasn’t that stupid—but for a long moment he could feel her eyes on him, hating him, trying to shame him into letting go. But Guinness wasn’t the type to shame easily.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally. “He said he had business that might keep him away until the morning. He thought I should go stay with a girl friend. Will you let me go? You’re hurting me.”

  “Until the morning? What keeps him away until the morning?” Guinness didn’t let go, didn’t even wait for an answer. “Does he do that sort of thing often, stay away from your white body all night like that?”

  “Not often, but sometimes.” There was a little something of challenge in her voice; no sarcasm, or anything like it, simply the implied recognition that where Guinness had once slept, there slept another now. And if he didn’t like it, he could lump it.

  G
uinness released his hold. What the hell did he care how the Duelles were getting along? Like he said, that wasn’t his stake in this business. She wasn’t his wife anymore. Duelle was welcome to her.

  Outside, even after eleven o’clock at night, the air was so damp you thought you might drown. The heat had been building all through the day, and Guinness, innocent California boy that he was, had thought that things must begin to cool off after the sun set, but apparently not. Somehow the fact that it was dark out made it worse; you had the feeling you were in one of those shady, high-humidity terrariums you saw in natural history museums—sticky, dank little oblong cases, full of peat moss and ferns and happy tarantulas. He wasn’t used to this kind of weather. He decided it must be making him irritable.

  There wasn’t a breath of wind. The only sound you heard was a weird, high-pitched, metallic twittering that would rise in waves and then drift off into silence, like rhythmless electronic music. Guinness had heard it the night before, but it seemed to be louder now, as if in protest against the merciless, sodden heat.

  “What’s that noise?” The question was sharp, like a command, as if he suspected the sound of hinting at some danger.

  “Cicada.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Just bugs,” she answered. “They’re like crickets. You hear them all summer long.”

  She shrugged her shoulders, and Guinness noticed that she was holding her arm as if he had hurt her. He began to think of saying that he was sorry and then stopped himself. He wasn’t sorry. He wished he’d broken her arm; he would have liked to strike her, a quick little snapping punch that would squash her nose like a maggot under a brick. It would give her a nice healthy taste of the kind of men she was dealing with, the kind of men she thought she could handle without any help from the likes of nasty old Ray Guinness, her cast off husband.

  “Do you like it here, Kathleen?” he asked savagely. “Does it do it for you, this malaria swamp? Do you have swell times out here, just you and Duelle and the crickets? Love among the fireflies, is that it?”

  She dropped her eyes, and then he really did feel ashamed. Not because he had hurt her arm but because he realized, in some way he couldn’t have hoped to define, that he had made her feel ashamed, ashamed of the man she had married in Guinness’s place.

  No, maybe it was even more than that. “He said he had business.” Did she believe him? Maybe not. Maybe Kathleen had her suspicions too, some inkling that her husband’s attitude toward this little matter wasn’t all it should be.

  Or maybe she just didn’t like him very much—like she didn’t much like Guinness. Maybe Duelle was simply a ringer, simply a little on the artificial side about everything, a man with catalogue book emotions.

  And then, maybe not.

  More than anything simply because he couldn’t for the moment risk meeting her gaze, he glanced into the back seat, where their daughter was asleep. Her face was covered by a corner of the blanket in which Kathleen had wrapped her, and Guinness delicately lifted it away so that he could see what she looked like.

  It was an odd sensation, after so many years to be looking upon the face of your own child. Guinness couldn’t really tell what he felt, as if there were so many things to feel that they cancelled each other out. She was her mother’s baby, that was sure. Even at nine and fast asleep she had that look of intelligent detachment that seemed to focus somewhere around the cheekbones and the straight lines of the nose. And he was there too, if nowhere else but in the hair that was lighter than her mother’s had ever been and had just a trace of copper in it.

  “Is she good in school?” He smiled to himself and brought his hand down so that it rested on the child’s hair, and he let his fingers slide over it so that he could feel its softness. It seemed a long time before Kathleen answered, and when he looked up he saw that her eyes were closed and that a single, transparent tear had forced its way out at one of the corners, where it clung tenaciously to the lash.

  “Yes.” The one word was muffled, as if she were trying to clear her throat without anyone noticing. “She’s very good in school. She’s already skipped a grade.”

  Guinness continued to allow his hand to rest on the child’s hair while he tried to figure out why Kathleen would have brought her along. Surely not to gratify any wish of his; she hadn’t given the impression lately that he was one of her favorite people. Then why? What was it she wanted him to see, this woman whom he had once loved?

  So why not just ask?

  Kathleen turned her head away and braced her hands against the steering wheel, as if she thought she could make the car move just by willing it. Whatever little tenderness there had been in her face was gone now; the features were set into that stiff mask he had seen when he had watched her guide her nursling down the walkway at the school.

  “I wanted you to remember who she was. I thought maybe if I could remind you that she used to be your daughter, then you might leave us in peace.”

  Guinness lifted his fingers from the child’s hair, straightening them out and noticing briefly how as he spread them apart it made the tendons stand out on the back of his hand. They looked like steel cables stretched tight under the skin.

  It was so difficult to believe that he was several seconds figuring out what she had meant. After all, she had been his wife once; what kind of a man did she think he was?

  “It’s because she still is my daughter that I’m staying.”

  He took the key back out of his pocket and put it in the ignition, damned if he would hold her a moment longer if she wanted to leave—if she could imagine such a thing of him. “I never knew what had happened to you. Until yesterday afternoon, for all I knew you might have been living in a cave in Greenland.” For a moment he let the silence between them simply hang there, like a curtain hiding one from the other.

  “Did you really think it was me, Katey?”

  Still not looking at him, she nodded rigidly; he might have thought that she was owning up to her mistake if she hadn’t turned on him the next second, her voice nothing more than a malicious, hating whisper.

  “Yes. Why shouldn’t I think it was you? Isn’t it kind of your style, Ray? Aren’t you the one who kills people for money—or for any other damn reason you can think of? Isn’t that your stock in trade?”

  So, there it was. The little innocent he had married back in the year of our Lord 1966, the dreamy-eyed philosophy major who believed in lute music, rose-hip tea, and the redeeming power of sexual love; she had grown up since then, and now she thought that good old Ray was maybe ogre enough to do a number on his own kid—their own kid—for some kinky reason that it took a fall from grace even to imagine.

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart. I didn’t send the picture. Don’t imagine you’re that important; I wouldn’t hurt my own blood, not even to get back at you. I didn’t even know who the little girl in the cross hairs was until I saw her with you; so it seems you have other enemies than just me.”

  He got out of the car and closed the door behind him as quietly as he could—he didn’t want to frighten the child. And he walked the twenty or thirty yards to his motel room, too angry even to look behind him, even when he heard the motor turning over and then throbbing into life and the squeal of the tires as Kathleen drove away with what was probably intemperate speed.

  She should watch herself. He didn’t give a damn at that moment if she piled herself up against some railway embankment—he might even be prepared to cheer—but she should have a care for the child.

  The child. Funny how hard it was to call her by name. She was his little Rocky, three quarters of the way to being a woman. In a few years she’d be having boyfriends and periods and all the other accouterments of adult life, and she’d have to take her chances in the world, just like everybody else.

  But not right yet. Right now she still had a father to take the chances for her. Maybe not the best, maybe not everything she might have wanted if it had been hers to choose, but a father who
wasn’t going to let anyone alive bring her to harm.

  Maybe she was a lucky little girl after all. Maybe old Ray was the kind of father she would need right now—the kind who would do what might have to be done and wouldn’t mind a little more blood on his hands.

  . . . . .

  All of his life, from his earliest memories of the scratchy sounds that came over the radio on the windowsill in his mother’s kitchen, Guinness had detested what was called country and western music. His mother would listen to nothing else—indeed, he was dangerously close to puberty before he even knew there was anything else—and his loathing for the stuff, with its slovenly, erratic yowlings about the sorrows of faithless love, stemmed from that association.

  His mother, with her tawdry True Confessions vision of herself as the wronged and wretched heroine, how she had hated him for the unpardonable inconvenience caused her by the fact of their enforced cohabitation of those four scruffy little rooms over a diner in Newark, Ohio. How she had grumbled under the burden there was no husband to help her bear—the father, apparently, the precise reason for whose absence, whose status, whether truant or dead, or perhaps simply nonexistent, was left nothing if not murkily undefined, had bequeathed the guilt of his perfidy to his son, and it was a legacy there seemed to be no means of rejecting.

  So when, on Guinness’s sixteenth birthday, mother and son had parted company forever, neither of them was anything except relieved, and Guinness never listened to the music from the kitchen window again.

  But you couldn’t control the world. The down home voice and the slangy guitar music that came over the juke box at the Study Hall Bar, as Guinness chewed morosely on the corner of a soggy square of pizza, was very much not to his taste; however, there didn’t seem to be much he could do about it. Unless he was prepared to do battle single handed against seventy or eighty drunken college boys, not to mention their ladies, he had better hold his peace. Apparently in this part of the world also they didn’t know there was anything else.