Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  Guinness wondered, just as a kind of academic exercise, what would have happened if Junior had been one of those sensitive souls who lose their tempers—could he have taken the boy out? He thought so, yes. It was a small room, and Junior wasn’t more than six or seven feet away; a feint and a rush, and it wouldn’t have been very hard to get inside before he had a chance to pull the trigger. Pistols were vastly overrated weapons for this sort of eyeball to eyeball stuff.

  But nobody was going to jump anybody. What the hell—after all this, after getting his face split open like a ripe cantaloupe, he wasn’t going to take any chances on getting anybody killed. Duelle he didn’t particularly care about, but Junior was another matter. You couldn’t always guarantee how things would work out, and Junior wasn’t of any use dead. Guinness shrugged his shoulders and smiled; anything to be obliging.

  “I’d tell you, but I don’t suppose you want me frightening your friend.” He nodded toward Duelle, who still looked as if he expected a bloodbath within the next twenty or thirty seconds. “Tuck the children in for the night, and we’ll talk. Hell, loyalty to one’s employers is all very well, but it isn’t the sort of thing I’m interested in dying over.”

  Junior seemed to be weighing the gun in his hand as he thought it over. What was coming next was obvious; he was just gearing himself up for it.

  Guinness tried not to think at all. He didn’t want to prepare for anything, didn’t want to bungle into defending himself and so ruin everything. Better just to let it happen.

  It was very fast when it did come; Guinness couldn’t be sure he would have been able to stop it even if he’d wanted to. Junior just whipped out with his gun and caught him on the side of the head, almost precisely where the edge of the desk had swollen that half of his face until it felt as if any moment it might split open like a rotting apple. The blow dropped him—he couldn’t have helped himself; he simply went limp, as if someone had severed the nerves in his legs—and for a moment, as he curled into a tight little ball on the office floor, Guinness was oblivious to everything except the tearing sensation that seemed to go through his whole body in angry pulses. He wouldn’t have believed that anything could hurt so much.

  Still, as he began very slowly to come back together again as something other than a receptor of pain, it wasn’t really the sort of thing he could bring himself to resent. Getting whipped up on was an occupational hazard; you learned to put up with it just as taxi drivers put up with hemorrhoids. And it had been the correct move; he would have done the same thing under the circumstances. Hell, Junior had the gun. He was the one to be dictating terms, and there wouldn’t have been any percentage for him in fostering the impression that he could be bargained with. In this business you just couldn’t allow yourself to submit to that kind of nonsense. It was bad for your image.

  And then there was poor old Duelle, who would require something to stiffen his spine for him, an object lesson to haunt his dreams after he had been sent off to his little house on Strawberry Lane, where the threat of violence must seem remote in the extreme. Fear, it was the lowest common denominator; what else but fear would keep a schlub like that in line?

  So Guinness couldn’t really object. He didn’t object at all; he just wished he could remember how to move.

  Gradually, however, his head stopped ringing like a gong, and he thought he might be able to open his eyes without there being too much danger of them simply falling out of their sockets. He took his time; he didn’t want to give the impression that he hadn’t gotten the point—he would be a very good and cooperative boy from now on and spill his guts all over the place so that, please, sir, he shouldn’t tempt a second such rebuke. So he faked it a little. It wasn’t very difficult.

  When he did come around he was pleased to discover that he and Junior were alone. Duelle, probably much to his own relief, had been allowed to leave, and now matters would be left where they belonged, with the two principal parties.

  The door was open and Junior, who was half sitting on the edge of the desk, idly flipping over the leaves of Duelle’s desk calendar, made a casual gesture toward the hallway with his other hand.

  “Get up,” he said, without apparent malice or enthusiasm. “We got business elsewhere.” He glanced over to where Guinness was still huddled and frowned, indicating that he wasn’t prepared to wait all day.

  Guinness made it up to his knees and then rested for a second, his hands braced against the arm of a chair in which, presumably, students sat during out of class conferences with Professor Duelle. He was okay, he decided. His right eye had been closed almost to a slit by then, but he could still see through it; and his face, though maddeningly sensitive—just the slightest pressure from his fingertips was enough to set it throbbing again—wasn’t painful enough to constitute a distraction. He probably didn’t look very pretty, but that was perfectly all right. He and Junior weren’t going to a debutante’s ball together.

  From the neck down he still worked fine. Anyway, well enough. The mechanism would hold together for the next few hours, at least. He didn’t particularly care for the taste of blood that was in the back of his mouth, but that was something he would have leisure to worry about later—if there was going to be a later. If not, well, then he wouldn’t have to worry about it at all.

  With the help of the chair, he managed to get back to his feet, and when he let go he didn’t fall back down. He looked at Junior, and Junior nodded toward the door, bringing his gun, which still rested casually on his thigh, into line with Guinness’s chest. It wasn’t a threat, really; just a reminder about who was running the show. Guinness could take a hint.

  He went out into the hallway and around to the elevators, slow and easy and keeping away from the walls. He didn’t need eyes in the back of his head to know that Junior was right behind him. They stood together in front of the elevator doors, waiting for them to open, deliberately avoiding each other’s eyes.

  Going down, and all the way to the parking lot on the other side of the library, where Junior had left his car, Guinness didn’t suppose he could have overpowered him more than twice—not a bad track record for a kid like that against a man of his age and experience.

  The car was a boxy looking sedan; in the dark you couldn’t tell the make or even the color. Guinness waited at a discreet distance for his instructions, and it was with a certain sinking feeling that he watched the kid take his keys out of his pocket and unlock the trunk.

  “Get in,” he said, backing away from the open lid. “It’s a big car and you’ll have plenty of room. Come on, climb aboard.”

  There wasn’t plenty of room. Junior had lied. In fact, Guinness had to draw his knees almost all the way up to his chin to fit. The jack had been left out, and there didn’t seem to be anyplace he could put it so that he didn’t end up lying across the shaft or getting stabbed in one or another soft and vulnerable spot by a corner of the stand. He hoped they didn’t have far to go.

  Guinness had never been locked in a car trunk before. It was a new experience for him, and just a little scary. These things were very nearly hermetically sealed, and how big could they be? Thirty cubic feet at the outside. He tried to compute how long a man could live on thirty cubic feet of air. How much air does a man take in with each breath? He wished to hell that as an undergraduate he had paid more attention to biology.

  He was very glad Junior was as young as he was. Someone with more experience would have known that you can’t get much useful information out of a man when he knows you’re planning to kill him anyway; he’ll clam up and take no end of punishment just for spite. Had it been him up there in the driver’s seat, what would he have done? Take the car to some nice deep stretch of the lake, probably, and just send it in—provided he’d had brains enough to use a stolen car. He wondered what that would be like, to be locked in and feel the water coming through the cracks around the tire wells. There were times when he thought perhaps he had too graphic an imagination for this line of work.

>   Where the hell were they going? Probably somewhere Junior could work him over good without having to worry about waking the neighbors.

  Guinness didn’t have the faintest intention of being the strong silent type; he had been questioned before—after the first time, once the novelty had worn off, it wasn’t so very terrible—and he knew he tended to scream a lot. Someone had told him once that the guys who try toughing it out without so much as a grunt are the first ones to crack. Nobody was paying him to be a hero, and he didn’t know any secrets anyway; so he wasn’t going to worry about a trifle like his dignity. Let Junior have all the fun he wanted—it gave you that much more chance of an opening, and, anyway, the idea was to stay alive.

  The thing that made his flesh crawl, however, was the realization that probably he had made a mistake. These things become much clearer when you are locked up in the trunk of a car; the feeling of helplessness seemed to throw everything into a much clearer relief, and the simple fact was that he had made a boo-boo.

  What a naive assumption, to think they were going to worry all that much about what McAffee could tell them and what he couldn’t! What the hell should they care? Junior wasn’t acting like a man who had any orders about keeping anybody alive until the truth in all its purity should be revealed.

  Oh, he might ask a few idle questions, but in any case, his first concern would be to protect Duelle. So McAffee wasn’t really working for the Bureau; what difference could that really make to Junior? The important thing for him would be simply to keep from embarrassing his employers, to cut off all the loose ends. That limited objective would be met as soon as McAffee was worm food—everything else was entirely in the nature of a bonus.

  So, the chances were pretty fair that the minute that trunk lid opened, Junior would put a pill in him. He might wait until Guinness had climbed out and was standing away from the car—no percentage in getting clotted gore all over the vinyl—but there wouldn’t be much reason for him to wait any longer. Guinness wouldn’t have bothered with a lot of fancy footwork, so why should he? Get to the business at hand.

  Guinness could imagine just exactly how it would go.

  Junior would turn his key and then stand well back and let him crawl out on his own. His knees would be stiff from so much time in that tiny space, and so he would be slow; Junior would count on that. And they would be all alone somewhere, miles from anybody. Guinness would push the lid open and begin to maneuver his legs over the rear bumper, glad to be breathing fresh air again, and trying to avoid bumping his head. He wouldn’t make five paces before his brains would be leaking out through the back of his skull.

  Was that how it was going to end? Forty years on the razor’s edge, coming to an abrupt halt in the middle of a pine forest in South Carolina? He didn’t even know the name of the man who was going to murder him—not that it mattered much.

  The left tire bounced in and out of a pothole; it sounded like a cannon shot. The car stopped for a moment, probably at a traffic light, and Guinness tried listening for something that might tell him where they were. It was no use, the noise from the exhaust pipes blurred out every other sound. They might have been anywhere. By the time they started up again, Guinness had lost interest in guessing games and was thinking about his government insurance policy.

  There was a federal regulation that you had to have one, and the cost was covered by withholding, but it had always seemed a stupid business. He had had no one to list as a beneficiary, so the whole twenty thousand would go to the alumni scholarship fund at UCLA. He had done part of his graduate work there, and it seemed as good a choice as any.

  He wished there were some way he could get that money for Rocky, now that it seemed so probable that somebody was about to collect. It would have been nice if she could have had something from her old man.

  But that was simple morbidity. Maybe that was what it was like when the organism confronts the fact of its own extinction; maybe you thought about all the loose ends, all the things you had forgotten. It would be terrible if you were really ready to die.

  Guinness closed it off. Better to think of the technical problem. If he got it, it would be because he hadn’t covered himself properly—nothing was gained by seeing things in any other terms. If he lost the round, then he lost it. No point in making a big, sloppy, sentimental deal out of it. This was the wrong time for a formal consideration of ultimate values; there wasn’t any evidence that philosophers died any easier than other men. And besides, he wasn’t dead yet.

  The technical problem. If he lived through the first thirty-five or forty seconds after getting out of the trunk, he would be all right. It wouldn’t be the first time he had gone up against an armed man without so much as a beanshooter. If Junior didn’t do the smart thing and kill him right away, then everything would be fine.

  It was, however, a fairly substantial if. Relying on others to be even more stupid than you are is not the way to a long and happy life, and that was what he would be doing if he placed his faith in Junior’s generosity of heart. Somehow he had to take the initiative away from him; right from the start, in those first few seconds. It was necessary, and yet it seemed impossible.

  And then Guinness remembered the tire jack.

  14

  Be Prepared, that’s the Boy Scouts’ motto. Guinness fished around in the pocket of his trousers for the book of matches he had picked up at dinner; he wanted a better idea of how the lock was articulated than he could get by feel. Surely he hadn’t left them behind—his second wife had talked him into giving up cigarettes, but carrying matches was the unshakable habit of every headhunter and spook in the known world. You could never tell when somebody might shut you up in the trunk of his car.

  The match head ignited with a cough into a flame, at first pale pink and then yellow, that in the darkness to which his eyes had become accustomed was almost blinding. There was a strong smell of sulfur, but then he had been forced to light the thing almost directly in front of his face.

  It burned pretty good, so maybe he had more air than he imagined. Maybe the trunks of cars were really as leaky as sieves, and all that rubber lining around the rim of the lid was strictly for show.

  The lock was the simplest thing in the world, just a tongue of stamped metal with a groove in it that was supposed to hook onto a loop of ⅜-inch rod, like a croquet wicket bent sharply forward at the waist. The match burned out and Guinness didn’t bother to light a second. He knew everything he needed to know, and he couldn’t very well hold another one in his teeth while he worked on breaking out.

  He finally found the jack handle, which had worked itself comfortably into a corner down by his feet, and he was relieved to discover that it was one of the old fashioned kind, elbow shaped and with one end tapered down to a flat edge like the point of a screwdriver.

  By now his hands were slippery, and great drops of sweat were running down his forehead and into his eyes. It was probably 120 degrees in that trunk, and his state of mind wasn’t helping things along any. The first time he tried to fit the tip of the jack handle in behind where the lock

  tongue hooked, working by feel to guide it to a purchase, the thing slipped and cut a short gash along the inside of his middle finger, almost up to the nail. He put it into his mouth and could taste blood.

  Damn! Come on, Guinness, get your act together. If he pulls over somewhere before you’ve sprung this thing, you’re cold meat.

  The third time he tried, though, he knew he had it. Just a touch of pressure and the ugly little darling would pop open like the fly buttons on Fatty Arbuckle’s trousers; the only part of it that worried him was the noise. But no—just a discreet tug, the dull sound that a can opener makes punching its little triangular hole. Junior couldn’t have heard it and wouldn’t have thought it could mean anything if he had.

  Guinness raised the lid about two inches—no more, lest Junior should see something in his rearview mirror he didn’t like—and stuck his hand through the opening to keep it from boun
cing if they hit another pothole. The fresh air was beautiful and cool, and the movement of the car sucked all the heat and staleness out of the trunk. After about twenty seconds he pulled the lid back down and held it closed, tucking the jack handle between his arm and the floor. It wasn’t very comfortable, but he would have it that way when he needed it. Be prepared, that’s the Boy Scouts’ motto.

  There really wasn’t anything to do now except to wait.

  The muscle on the inside of Guinness’s arm was beginning to tire from holding the lid closed, and he was afraid that it might decide to cramp on him. He tried shifting around enough so he could use his right arm, twisting over until he would be nearly on his back, but it was painful because he couldn’t straighten his legs, and his knees were caught by the low sloping front of the trunk. Anyway, for a little while every now and then, he could work his right hand up over the top of the lock mechanism and keep everything in place. It wasn’t very comfortable, but at least he wouldn’t be too stiff to move when the time came.

  They were no longer driving on pavement. The shocks on Junior’s car were clearly past their first youth; with every little variation in the road grade, the bottom of the trunk would sink out from under him and come back up smartly to catch him down the whole length of his body, from ankle to shoulder. But at least he was able to keep the lid closed.

  It wasn’t so bad now. These things were only bad when you couldn’t figure your way to doing anything. Guinness remembered a cartoon he had seen once of two tiny figures, both with long, overgrown beards, chained hand and foot to a blank wall, with only a tiny barred window high over their heads; one of them had his face turned to the other and was whispering: “Now here’s my plan.” You could put up with anything as long as you could imagine the possibility of escape. It didn’t matter if the possibility was real or not; the important thing was to believe in it.

  It had been stupid to worry about his insurance policy. He wasn’t going to end up a corpse, not him. With any luck, he might live forever. Still, when he got back to Washington he would have it changed.