Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  It turned out that the only Healy listed anywhere was an Eric Healy in Pendleton—83 Belmina Street, Pendleton.

  Now where was Pendleton. . ?

  Pendleton, as it turned out, was right next door, in fact umbilically attached to Clemson. It was nicer, though—a real town, not just scattered collections of shopping centers. There was a grassy central square, with some rather fine old buildings around it, one of which housed the Pendleton Historical Society. Pendleton, it seemed, had been the original village, the end of the railroad line, the place to which, a hundred years ago, all the important men of Charleston had shipped their families every summer to escape the cholera. So Pendleton had a history of sorts.

  Guinness drove around the square, thinking that it would be nice to come back someday—sometime when there was nobody he had instructions to fit with a brick necktie.

  According to the map, Belmina Street would be the easiest thing in the world to find. Just take the left hand fork immediately past the railroad tracks, and then left again. It really was easy.

  He drove through at just a shade over twenty miles per hour; on a residential street, people tended to notice cars that crept through, wondering what you could be up to, and there were always the watchful mothers whose children played on the front lawn and who therefore lived in horror of fast cars.

  The house numbers were all very visible on the mail boxes—imagine, mailboxes—so he spotted 83 Belmina thirty or forty feet in advance. Plenty of time to see everything there was to be seen without appearing to stare.

  There wasn’t much. Just another shoe box on a cinderblock foundation, with three cement steps leading up to the front door. A clapboard exterior about three years away from its last paint job, with enough brown spots on the grass to suggest that the lord and master didn’t have much in the way of a green thumb. The usual.

  There was a boy’s bicycle lying like a dead animal in the middle of the driveway—Guinness wished he hadn’t seen it. He didn’t want to know anything about Eric Healy’s humanity; he didn’t really understand why he had come out here. It was a hell of a world where the thugs set themselves up as husbands and fathers, just like the rest of creation.

  Yes he did understand. Eric Healy’s humanity was very much to the point—if it could be made to serve. Guinness might not like himself very much for it, but he knew perfectly well why he was there; and then, Healy hadn’t displayed any scruples about putting the arm on his kid. Hostages to fortune and all that.

  He would do a little checking, just to be sure. In these matters, it was worth keeping in mind that there weren’t any innocent bystanders. The bicycle on the driveway was nothing more than another token in the game, nothing to start having qualms about. Certainly Healy would have no kick coming on that score.

  He drove past and connected back up with the road to Clemson. Tuttle was supposed to phone back in less than an hour.

  11

  Concerning their own side, Tuttle had not been terribly helpful. No, he hadn’t been able to find out anything germane about the Oconee Project and its well fortified research facility out in the piney woods, much less about how Duelle might be said to fit in. “Nobody’s supposed to know it,” he had confided gleefully—Ernie had a passion for inside information of the kind that the clerk typist to the second assistant secretary would let drop like a horseshoe at Washington cocktail parties—“but your boy friend’s little toy factory is being financed, at several removes to be sure, by the Pentagon’s Study Group on Tactical Problems, and they’ve never been what you could characterize as forthcoming with their secrets. I’m surprised they didn’t turn you into a cinder the instant you ventured within two hundred feet of their gate.”

  Healy was another matter. “Oh, yeah. Justice has a yellow sheet on him as long as your arm. Narcotics, assault, firearms traffic, you name it. No mention of anything on our side of the street, but the junk business down there tends to discourage your small independent dealer. You can bet somebody owns Healy and is renting him out to Flycatcher as a professional courtesy. The man seems to be very well connected.”

  Guinness replaced the receiver of the phone on the counter at the Western Auto store—they can’t put a tap on you if they don’t know where you’ve arranged to take the call—and smiled amiably at the manager, who wasn’t just wild about having his business line taken up for personal calls, but on the other hand hadn’t quite known how to tell that to a long distance operator asking for an Inspector McAffee after having specified that the call was coming from the Washington offices of the legendary FBI. Ernie Tuttle’s secretary did that sort of thing very well.

  The poor man stood there by his cash register, the knuckles of both hands resting on a glass case filled, oddly enough, with fishing tackle, looking for all the world like a puzzled and suspicious ape, an effect heightened by the heaviness of the beard covering his closely shaved jaw and the fact that his coarse black hair was cut very short, emphasizing the smallness of his head. He didn’t much like Guinness—you didn’t have to be psychic to see that—didn’t like liberties being taken with his phone, and probably didn’t like people with smart ass Yankee accents, period. But a cop was a cop and he also wouldn’t like any trouble with the law, so he said nothing.

  Guinness suddenly felt slightly ashamed. There was no particular reason why he should, but he had been leaned on by a few policemen in his time too, and he hadn’t cared for it either. It made him feel like he was on the wrong side.

  He glanced down at the contents of the display case under the man’s knuckles. Such a store, in a little town like this, probably had to have four or five sidelines of merchandise to keep afloat. You couldn’t make a living out here selling nothing but gas cans.

  “Any fish in that lake of yours?” he asked, pointing to a spinning reel with a low enough price tag to be smuggled into his per diem. “I thought I might as well wet a line while I was down here; there’s a fair sized river near where I live, but you couldn’t catch anything in there anymore except maybe a case of ringworm.”

  Ten minutes later he was walking back to his car with the reel, a box of metal lures, and a collapsible rod constructed out of jointed sections of Teflon tubing, having made a friend for life and spent enough money so that some of it would have to come out of his own pocket. Well, maybe he would get in a little fishing. He didn’t really think so—too much like a busman’s holiday. He didn’t even like to fish.

  Opening the door of his car to throw all this useless junk onto the back seat, he damn near fried his fingers on the handle. Christ! The roof was probably hot enough to use as a pancake griddle. It was ninety-five out if it was a degree, and the humidity made your shirt stick to you like a bandage. The last thing in the world he wanted was to stand by the shore of that God forsaken mud puddle with a damn fishing rod while the mosquitoes and the horseflies had him for lunch.

  At that moment, all he wanted in the world was to drive back to his air conditioned motel room, where he could wait in something like comfort for the heavies to make their next move.

  And they would now, very soon. It was the time when push comes to shove and, provided Duelle was anxiety ridden enough to have picked up on the official skepticism Guinness had spent the better part of lunch parading under his nose, they would have to do something. They would have to act to make themselves credible as terrorists; they couldn’t trade forever on one poor little photograph with a few threats scribbled on the back.

  As he always did at this stage in the chase, Guinness just wanted to find a hole somewhere, a quiet place to be alone with his fear.

  If you hunt a man to kill him, you crawl inside his skin and wait there until his own patterns of habit do your work for you. What he’ll do three days in a row, he’ll do on the fourth; and by then you understand him well enough that you can feel his weaknesses as if they were your own. You become–or he becomes—a second self.

  Dangerous enough to the soul, since murder translates itself into an alternative to suic
ide. The necessity of freeing yourself from this other self—or this other within whom you can feel yourself drowning—both mandates and justifies the act, but the act diminishes whatever self is left until gradually you feel yourself weakening under the accumulating burden. It takes its own time; still, you feel that no one could endure forever. Marley’s ghost, weighed down with the chains of his own forging. Who would even want to go on like that, for a whole lifetime?

  Mostly, however, one’s sins lie lightly enough; for long periods one hardly even knows that they’re there. Guilt, like stamp collecting, is something indulged in at intervals snatched from the real business of life.

  This using yourself for bait, though, that was quite another thing. They would have to come for him; that was the most reasonable thing to expect. There simply weren’t that many other things for them to do.

  Anyone can send a threatening note, but it takes a certain daring to kill a federal agent. It validates you, in a sense. It insists that you be taken seriously. With Inspector McAffee found in the trunk of his car, the condition of his skull reminding one of the finger slots in a bowling ball, the authenticity of Holman Duelle’s peril wasn’t likely to be questioned again.

  Guinness was practically inviting them to hit him. It was the correct move, it might shake something loose. It might even bring Flycatcher himself back up to the surface—nobody really knew how much discretion he was accustomed to giving his subordinates—and there really wasn’t much else Guinness could do. Still, that didn’t make it any more fun.

  Guinness knew all about fear. It was his profession to know all about fear. Fear was the handmaiden of remorse. The threat of death, the knowledge that death was an ever present possibility, made your hands sweat and stimulated your conscience; it was nothing more than a change in the body chemistry, of adrenaline levels and an increase in the heart rate. No man ever really repented in safety.

  And fear made you sentimental, if there was a difference. Guinness could feel himself getting all warm and runny inside, full of all manner of tender feelings for Kathleen and their child, and he was disgusted with himself. When it came to those kinds of emotional attachments, it was better to travel light.

  Still, it wasn’t a crime to miss people. Lose the capacity to grieve and they don’t have to kill you because you’ll already be dead. That was the great trick, to find some sort of workable compromise between the ever conflicting necessities of detachment and human feeling. You couldn’t even be a good assassin if you lost your soul; machines didn’t have the requisite imagination.

  Guinness climbed into the driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition, stifling the tiny spasm of terror as the starter began to grind slowly into life. Once, but for the perverse gallantry of a former KGB colonel interested only in a deferred and appropriately intelligible revenge, he had very nearly been blown into atoms in his car, and it had had its effect; it was only by the purest exercise of the will that he could restrain himself from checking the wiring every time he had to drive somewhere, and often as not he would quickly run his hand under the seat to see if there weren’t a few sticks of dynamite fastened with electrical tape to the springs. It wasn’t as if such things never happened.

  He wondered what would become of Kathleen now. Would she stay single this time, bitter and discontent and glad to be growing older? It was hard to imagine, after two such spectacular failures, that she would ever risk marriage again. Still, you couldn’t tell; not even caution could be counted on to prevail over biology and loneliness.

  And their baby, she would doubtless mature to womanhood without his ever setting eyes on her again. Lucky little girl.

  Was it childish of him to resent that? He wasn’t good for people, which wasn’t much of a revelation, but you couldn’t help being irritated with someone for being better off left alone. Guinness was human enough not to much fancy himself as a pariah.

  The mechanisms of parenthood, a peculiar business. She was an abstraction, his daughter. Really, how could he connect up this half grown girl with the little sexless bundle of arms and legs and baby fat that he remembered pulling down the kitchen tablecloth in their flat in London? And yet the tug was strong, as if some reservoir of feeling had been waiting all these years, hidden away in unconscious self defense, until it could find a new channel into which to escape, emotions being unparticular and not caring to what they attached themselves.

  His way took him back through the campus of the university, and he stopped at a crosswalk to let a crowd of students, in companionable knots and clusters, make its uneven way from one side of the road to the other. They seemed, on the whole, handsomer than the ones who had taken up space in his classrooms in California, especially the girls. One of them, particularly, in trousers and a thin pastel yellow blouse, her heavy, loose curls of light brown hair playing teasingly around her shoulders as she hugged her notebooks to her breast and laughed soundlessly at perhaps nothing at all. Would Rocky grow up to be like that, something to haunt young men’s dreams?

  Then let them be safe young men, bank executives and pharmacists, living in the brutal innocence of ordinary life. Not like her father.

  Guinness was perfectly aware that he was being morbid and childish. Doubtless by now Rocky was sitting next to her mother in a passenger lounge at the Atlanta airport, bored stiff with the waiting and wondering what was going on and if it might be possible to talk Kathleen into buying her a movie magazine. He would do well to forget all about Rocky. Let Rocky and her mother have their futures, for better or worse, without him.

  Simply to be able to think of something else, he began trying to guess how long it would be before Duelle’s friends made their move. Not long, certainly. They wouldn’t know what McAffee’s reporting schedule would be, but if they acted quickly they might reasonably expect to catch him before he communicated any of his inconvenient suspicions to his superiors. After all, he hadn’t been in town more than forty-eight hours, and this wasn’t a very high priority investigation. McAffee might be counted on to nose around a little further before committing himself even to a suspicion. Sometime before tomorrow morning, he would imagine. They would be nervous little men—conspirators were always nervous little men—and their patience was likely to be short.

  He would plan nothing. Let them do the planning; plans, in the final analysis, only got in the way. A plan committed you to thinking about things from one particular angle of vision. They were like blinders. When the time came, he would play it by ear and hope for the best.

  Let the mind be like water, as the wise old men in the Kung Fu movies would say. Deal with the world as it comes to you.

  Suddenly he realized that he was very hungry. It hadn’t been more than a few hours since he had eaten lunch, but he was starving just the same. Nerves, probably.

  He checked his watch. A few minutes after five, early enough to have dinner without anybody thinking he was strange; and all things considered, he would prefer to eat early. They wouldn’t make their move right away, but they might before the night was over—anytime after, say, nine o’clock; they would need at least that much time to pull their act together—and he didn’t want to be sluggish with a lot of food. He was always better at knuckle tag for being a little hungry.

  There was a restaurant on 123, within sight of his motel, calling itself the “Chato”—the quotation marks apparently being part of the name—and Guinness thought he would try it. He didn’t feel like wandering far afield, and the ad in the telephone book described it as a “steak house.” There was a limit to how much damage you could do a steak.

  There was a handsome woman in her mid forties who showed him to his table, apologizing for the fact that the band wouldn’t start until after seven. She could have saved her breath; Guinness hated music when he ate, especially live music, which was always too loud.

  He ordered a drink, a gin and tonic, and the waitress brought it out to him in one of those tiny bottles that you see sometimes on planes, along with a glass with i
ce in it. The South was supposed to be a patchwork of bizarre liquor laws. He twisted the cap off the bottle, poured its contents into the glass, and gave himself over to a close study of the menu.

  The second Mrs. Guinness—poor Louise, who had bled out her life on their kitchen floor to atone for crimes not her own, crimes she didn’t even know about—had been a great enemy of red meat. “People eat too much of that crap,” she would say. “You should read what they give those poor steers to fatten them up; it would curl your hair. It’s just a miracle we’re not all dead from cancer this minute.” Fish and chicken had been the thing, and the chicken served without the skin, lest the triglycerides got you before you had a chance to rise from the table. And green salad with oil and vinegar dressing. “I haven’t the slightest intention of ending up a middle aged widow who has to clerk in an insurance company.”

  Well, she needn’t have worried.

  And Guinness, who no longer had a soul on earth to worry about him, had lost interest in fish and chicken. Considering the alternatives, a coronary at fifty didn’t sound like such a bad deal.

  The waitress came back and asked him if he’d like another drink. Like all the rest of the slave labor in the area, she was country pink and breathless and not a day over twenty, and Guinness had the distinct impression that she didn’t approve of Demon Rum. Probably her daddy drank white lightning by the fruit jar, but liquor in a public place, right in front of God and everybody, seemed to be another question entirely. Guinness shook his head and said no, thank you. He wasn’t much of a boozer to begin with and, just before the start of what might be a busy night, getting pie eyed wasn’t his idea of smart.

  He ordered a very large piece of roast beef, an end piece if they could manage it, with a baked potato. The salad, he discovered with pleasure, involved a whole great bowl of chopped lettuce and a lazy susan with four different kinds of dressing—you could go on forever.

  He ordered a beer too. Beer makes you fat but leaves the head clear.