He locked the car and went back to the three vans, and the middle van’s hatch was still unlocked. He raised it and climbed in, clambering over all the gear you’d expect to find in the back of the guy’s van—golf clubs, fishing tackle, a tool box, an array of unboxed tools, an old denim jacket, a tire iron, a hammer, a set of Allen wrenches—
There were almost too many options.
And way too much time to weigh them. Keller picked up the hammer and hunkered down on the left, right behind where the driver would sit. This wasn’t the first time he’d waited in an unoccupied vehicle, and on one previous occasion he’d had an improvised garrote. Which, now that he thought about it, was really the only kind there was, because you couldn’t go into a store and buy a ready-made garrote.
Though he supposed that could change overnight. All you needed was a powerful lobby, a group calling itself the National Garrote Association, say, and funded by an international cartel of garrote manufacturers, fully prepared to throw a lot of money at legislators while citing the relevant constitutional amendment. Probably not the one guaranteeing freedom of speech, because speech was difficult with a wire around your throat, and anyway nobody had the right to cry “Garrote!” in a crowded vehicle, and—
He never expected to drift off, not in such an uncomfortable position, but his thoughts drifted and his mind ambled along after them, and if he wasn’t technically asleep, he was anything but bright-eyed and alert.
Until the argument woke him.
His immediate reaction to the three voices, three vaguely familiar voices at that, was an attempt to incorporate them into his dream. Then one of them said, “He can’t drive, the sonofabitch is shitfaced,” and another said, “Who you callin’ a sonofabitch, you sonofabitch?” and he came fully awake while Cowboy Hat and Marlboro Man argued over who would give Tom Cruise a ride home.
It was like a custody battle over an unwanted child. “You take him!” “Hell no, you take him!” The child, meanwhile, insisted he’d be just fine on his own, and Keller got the feeling they’d had this argument before. It ended with Tom Cruise’s stunt double, insisting on his statutory right to drive drunk or sober, getting into his van and pulling out. Keller braced himself, expecting to hear brakes squeal or worse, but heard neither.
That left two of them, Cowboy Hat and Marlboro Man, and if they weren’t as drunk as their friend, neither were they sober. And so they stood between the two remaining vans having the sort of conversation one might expect them to have, and Keller’s heart sank when Cowboy Hat said, “You know what? He’s the one who was drunk, am I right or am I right?”
“One or the other,” Marlboro Man agreed.
“And he went home, so how about you and I kick back one more beer before we go?”
“What, back in there? Back in the Wet Spot?”
“Why not?”
“Too many tattoos.”
“What, the gal behind the bar? Ol’ Maggie?”
“Way too many tattoos.”
“Yeah, like you wouldn’t do her if you had the chance.”
“Did her once.”
“Bullshit.”
“She was drunk, I was drunk, all I remember is we did it. Woke up to a room full of tattoos. Whole lot you don’t get to see when she’s got her clothes on.”
“You don’t want to go back for one more beer? On account of tattoos?”
God, this was endless. Was there a way to get out of the car and take them both out? There wasn’t, of course, not without a gun on full auto, and all he had was a hammer.
“Got it,” Cowboy Hat said. “The Spotted Tiger.”
“On Quincy? Love that place.”
“So I’ll meet you there. Or you want to ride with me?” Keller held his breath. “No, we should take both vans, in case you want to go home before I do.”
Keller released his breath.
“Me? You’ll be the one wants to leave first.”
“Me? Hell, man, you’re the pussy.”
“Always bringin’ up pussy, man. You want to smell my finger?”
And a little more banter, and Keller thought he was going to lose his mind, and then two van doors were sliding open, the one he was in and the one on the right, and Keller’s grip tightened on the hammer, because right now was the tricky part. If Marlboro Man happened to look in back while he was getting behind the wheel—
But he didn’t. He settled himself in the driver’s seat, slid the door shut, got his key in the ignition on the first try. On the right, Cowboy Hat was doing the same, and his engine started first. He gunned it, and now Marlboro Man answered in kind, and the two idiots took turns revving their engines, neither of them putting his van in gear, neither of them going anywhere.
Fifty-fifty, Keller thought. If Cowboy Hat drove away first, he’d swing the hammer and end it. If Marlboro Man led the way, he’d have to wait it out, see what opportunity presented itself along the way or at the Spotted Tiger.
Oh, the hell with it.
“YOU JUST WENT ahead,” Dot said. “Pablo, I don’t know how you found the nerve.”
“I was trying to think it through,” he said, “and it seemed to me that what I was doing was overthinking it.”
“Oh? Whatever gave you that idea?”
He was in his room at the Super 8. The first thing he’d done, after using the room phone to call Amtrak’s 800 number, was get out of his clothes and under the shower. He was wearing fresh clothes now, and seated in the unit’s comfortable chair. And on the Pablo phone, talking to Dot.
“I couldn’t wait,” he said. “Sooner or later he’d have to sense my presence and turn around, you know? So I hauled off and swatted him on the temple.”
“And the cowboy just drove off into the sunset?”
“Sunset was a couple of hours ago,” he said. “But that’s pretty much what happened. First thing he did was gun his engine, and then when my guy didn’t respond—”
“Which he couldn’t, with his skull caved in.”
“—he went and gunned it again, and then I guess he figured the game was over.”
“I’ll say.”
“I was waiting for him to come see what was wrong. He was on the right, so all he had to do was look in through the window on the passenger side, or the windshield in front. And he’d see the guy and figure he passed out or had a stroke or something, and he’d come around the van and try to help him, and I’d have a shot at him.”
“With your hammer. What’s the saying?”
“What saying?”
“‘When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.’ But you didn’t have to nail him, did you?”
“No,” he said. “He never got out of his van. He gunned the engine one last time and then backed up and drove away.”
“And your Marlboro Man was dead as a doornail.”
Well, was he? He was certainly out cold, but Keller hadn’t bothered to take his pulse. Simpler to swing the hammer a second time, with a blow that left nothing to chance.
“The job’s done,” he assured her.
He waited while she switched phones and called the client. “I didn’t tell him much,” she reported. “Just that his problem’s been solved, and where to send the money. I didn’t have a name to give him, because you never told me.”
“I never knew it myself.”
“You found him,” she said, “without knowing who you found. Well, that’s a first. I’ll tell you, the client couldn’t believe it happened so fast, and do you want to know something, Pablo? I’m pretty impressed myself.”
“You are?”
“I figured a week minimum and probably more like two. Detective work, you know? Sneaking around, lurking in the shadows, snooping around for clues. That’s a good week right there, and then you still need to find an opportunity to close the deal. What time did you get to Chicago? Eight in the morning?”
“I think it was more like nine.”
“That’s twelve hours ago.”
He looke
d at his watch. “Twelve and a half.”
“I stand corrected. When’s your train home, first thing tomorrow morning? Or is there one tonight?”
THERE WAS, BUT he’d missed it. The City of New Orleans left Chicago every evening at 8:05, arriving fifteen and a half hours later at the Loyola Avenue station. They’d probably been calling All aboard around the time he pulled into the Super 8 lot.
So he’d made a reservation for the following night, and now he considered his options. There was a Denny’s across the street and a Pizza Hut next door on the right, and he stood outside in the cool of the evening and couldn’t make a choice. It had taken him maybe thirty seconds to pick the Stanley hammer from the wide array of potential murder weapons, but it was taking him forever to choose between a pizza and a patty melt, and the truth of the matter seemed to be that he didn’t want either, or anything else.
But he knew he had to eat, and wound up in a booth at Denny’s, further confounded by the array of choices. He picked their Hungry Man’s Breakfast, which struck him as curious, given that he didn’t feel hungry and nobody but Denny thought it was time for breakfast. The waitress brought him a huge plate of food, and he surprised himself by eating all of it.
Back in his room, he did the mental exercises that always followed a job. Pictured the Marlboro Man as he’d last seen him, slumped over the steering wheel. And then went to work on that picture in the Photoshop of his mind, shrinking it, leaching the color out of it, then working on the tiny black-and-white image he’d made of it, fading it all to gray, shrinking it further until it was a dot, a pinpoint.
He’d taught himself this technique years ago, and for the most part it had proven effective. It wasn’t something you did just once, you had to repeat it, but eventually it was difficult to summon up the original image because you really had changed the look of it in your memory.
This time around it was a little hard to get started, because the only image he had to work with didn’t start out with much in the way of color or detail. It had been dark by then, and while there were lights in the parking lot, the trio of white vans had been parked well away from them. You’d think it would be easier to blur and shrink and fade an image that wasn’t all that vivid to begin with, but for some reason it wasn’t.
Well, he did what he could.
AND SLEPT WELL enough, although he awoke with a sense of having been troubled by dreams. He couldn’t recall a dream, couldn’t even say for certain that he’d been dreaming, but he got out of bed feeling less rested than untroubled sleep should have left him.
He checked out, skipped breakfast, and drove back to O’Hare to return the car. While he was there, he checked the board and saw that United had a flight to Louis Armstrong Airport scheduled to depart at 11:45.
No. Stick with the plan.
He took a cab to the train station, picked up the ticket he’d reserved, and checked his bag. He walked around until he found a place to have coffee, got a croissant while he was at it, and took out his phone. The Pablo phone was in his bag, along with the burner he’d bought and never used, but he was in Chicago now, not Baker’s Bluff, and he was Nicholas Edwards once again instead of James J. Miller, so it didn’t matter if his iPhone pinged off towers left and right.
He powered it up and called home, and Julia answered.
“I’m in Chicago,” he told her. “My train leaves around eight and gets in at three-thirty tomorrow afternoon.”
“And everything’s taken care of?”
“All wrapped up. I thought it would take longer, but it went well.”
“I bet it was the hat. I hope you’ve still got it.”
He lifted a hand, touched the brim to make sure. “I’m wearing it now.”
‘Well, be careful,” she said. “You’re in the Windy City.”
“That’s true.”
“Although I read somewhere that they call it that because the local politicians are such windbags, but I don’t know if I believe it. If that’s how it worked, wouldn’t every city be the Windy City?”
HE WALKED AROUND, looked at things, did a little shopping. Ate a meal, saw a movie. They had a lounge in Union Station for first–class passengers, and that’s what you became when you booked a roomette. He was in the lounge by 6:30, drinking coffee and watching CNN until they called his train for boarding.
“Good evening, Mr. Edwards. Good to see you again, sir.”
It was nice to have the same porter, nicer still that he happened to remember the man’s name. “Ainslie,” he said, and was rewarded with a smile, while Ainslie was in turn rewarded as before with a twenty-dollar bill.
The dining car wouldn’t be serving until breakfast, Ainslie told him, but there’d be coffee and sandwiches in the café car as soon as they got underway. Keller looked out the window for a while, went and had something to eat, and got back to his roomette in time to have Ainslie make up the bed. He lay in the dark for a long time, while the train sped up and slowed down, passing through stations. The last one he was aware of was Centralia, sometime after midnight.
He slept all right, surfacing every couple of hours but lulled back to sleep each time by the motion of the train. After breakfast he called home, but rang off when the call went to voice mail. He was only about a third of the way into Jake Dagger’s story, and he’d have returned to it if it hadn’t been in his checked bag.
The roomette was supplied with the current issue of Amtrak’s magazine, and he read an article proclaiming Richmond, Virginia, as a hot destination for foodies. Keller, a longtime New Yorker now living in New Orleans, was somehow skeptical. He tried to imagine a couple of Tribeca sophisticates, say, or their Vieux Carré equivalents, packing for a weekend of gourmet excess in Richmond. “We’ll take the train, darling! Oh, I can hardly wait to dig into that organic kale!”
But what did he know?
HE TRIED JULIA again, rang off when he got a busy signal. Then it was time for lunch, and he had his second meal in the dining car, and called her from his table while he finished his coffee. “Just a couple of hours,” he said, and she told him she’d pick him up at the station, but to call her if the train was going to be late. It was on time so far, he said.
“I did a little shopping in Chicago,” he added. “I bought Jenny a present.”
“Who’d have guessed? You know what I’ll do? I’ll pick her up from school on my way to the station. That might get me there closer to four than three-thirty.”
“That’s probably better anyway. I checked my bag, and that means waiting until it makes it to Baggage Claim.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Oh?”
“Your phone is in your bag.”
“No, darling,” he said patiently. “It’s in my hand. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“The other phone.”
“Uh—”
“Dot called a couple of hours ago. She said she couldn’t get through to you, and I said reception could be iffy on trains. She said she’d try again. But if your phone’s in your checked luggage—”
“I could call her,” he said. “On this phone. But if it’s important enough to call her—”
“Then it’s important enough to do it on the right phone.”
“I’d say so, yes.”
“Well, I’ll see you in a few hours.”
He ended the call, pocketed the phone, and tried to figure out a way that Dot’s call could be nothing to worry about. If the client was happy, if he’d sent the rest of the money, she might call him to tell him so. But, failing to reach him, would she call Julia?
No, she wouldn’t. So that wasn’t it.
While anything might have led her to pick up the Pablo phone, even a simple desire to congratulate him further on a job well done, the second call meant trouble. It indicated not merely that she’d been unable to reach him but that she’d needed to reach him, and that wouldn’t have been to offer congratulations, or to pass the time of day. Something had gone wrong.
“THE GOOD NEWS,” Dot said, “is that he thinks you did a hell of a job. In that respect he couldn’t be happier.”
“What’s the other respect?”
“I’ll get to that, Pablo. First let’s look on the bright side, okay?”
The bright side, he thought, was less of a pleasure to look at when you knew the dark side was coming. Still, he focused on it. He was home with his wife and daughter, both of whom seemed happy with what he’d brought them from Chicago. He’d done his work quickly and efficiently, and to the evident satisfaction of his employer. And now he was in his stamp room, talking on a safe phone with his best friend of many years standing. If there was bad news to come, he figured he could handle it.
“What I had to do,” Dot said, “is make it clear we’d done the job without telling him the name of the guy we’d done it on.”
“Because we didn’t know it.”
“And because it’s safer if he doesn’t know it, either. So what I did, I gave him a play-by-play of your investigation.”
“Oh?”
“I left out the wide-mouthed jar,” she said, “and the fedora. I told him you parked where you could keep an eye on the house, and at such-and-such a time the garage door opened, and a white van pulled in right next to the subject’s Lexus, and—”
“The subject?”
“That would be his wife, Pablo. Remember her?”
“Vividly. It was the word I was reacting to. ‘The subject.’”
“I was reporting to a client. I figured it was more businesslike to say ‘the subject’s Lexus’ than ‘that overpriced Japanese import you bought for your whore of a wife.’ May I continue?”
“Sorry.”
“I called the guy who got out of the van the unsub. That stands for—”
“Unidentified Subject.”
“I guess we watch the same TV shows. Other hand, Overmont must stick to PBS and the History Channel, because I had to translate the term for him. Anyway, Unsub exits vehicle, female subject meets and embraces him—”
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