Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

  Freddie said, “Josh, you got three seconds to get smart.”

  Josh looked at him in gloomy satisfaction. “U could die,” he said.

  “Peg,” Freddie said, “go around the block,” and he was already ripping off the head and gloves when he dove down and went rolling under the trailer.

  The henchmen shouted, as Peg accelerated, and Josh missed her wrist by a millimeter. The van went tearing away down the block. The henchmen ran around both ends of the truck. Josh bent to peer under the trailer, seeing nothing, hauling out his own very old and well-used pistol, just in case Freddie decided to come rolling back.

  The henchmen met at the far side, and stood over a pile of clothing on the sidewalk there. “He’s naked,” one of them said.

  “Duhhh,” the other one said, and fell down.

  The first henchman stared. It was a brick, is what it was, a big dirty brick, waving around in the air all on its own, and now it was coming after him. He backed away, stumbling over Freddie’s clothes, dropping to one knee in his panic, and took a shot up at the damn brick, and the bullet zipped away up into the understructure of the railroad, binging and caroming off the metal up there for quite a while.

  With a moan, the henchman dropped his pistol, swung about, and tried to escape on all fours, which meant he didn’t have far to drop, when he dropped.

  Josh remained crouched on the other side of the trailer. He could hear activity over there, but didn’t know what it meant. Then there was a shot, which he didn’t like; if there were seven or eight more like that, somebody might call the cops. But then there was silence, which was better, but not informative. Josh waited, and waited, and then something cold and hard touched his right cheek, and when he rolled his eyes down and to the right, it was a gun barrel. He froze.

  “Josh, I’m beginning to lose patience with you.”

  Freddie, behind him somehow. Where were the henchmen? Josh remained frozen.

  “Straighten up, Josh.”

  Josh did so.

  “Do you even have the money, you jerk?”

  “In car,” Josh said, moving nothing but his arm as he pointed away to his right and behind him, at one of the cars blocking access to the gate.

  “Is it locked?”

  “Dough no. Not mine.”

  The van returned then, having circled the block, and stopped next to Josh. Peg said, “Freddie, is that you?”

  “Yeah. My clothes are the other side of the trailer, would you get them?”

  “Sure.”

  While Peg got out of the van and trotted away, Josh stared and blinked at the side of the trailer, stared and blinked, afraid to turn around. Freddie was naked? Why?

  Peg came back with the pile of rumpled laundry and latex and tossed it into the van, then said, “Now what?”

  “He says the money’s in the car there. Is it locked?”

  Peg went over and tested. “No.”

  “Trusting.”

  “There’s three big manila envelopes on the backseat.”

  “F!” cried Josh. “F! F!”

  Peg said, “One of the envelopes has an F on it.”

  “Freddie!” cried Josh.

  “Is there money in it?”

  “There’s money in all three.”

  “Take them all.”

  “Just F!” Because the other two envelopes contained the extra sixty thousand earmarked—or dogeared—for Josh.

  “Shut up, Josh.”

  Josh, tried beyond endurance, spun around to remonstrate, to argue, to put his case, and found himself staring at the brick wall beyond the sidewalk. He goggled. “What? What?” Then he saw the pistol, hanging in the air, pointed at his face. Automatically, he thrust out a hand, and it hit something where there wasn’t anything: flesh, a chest. “Aaaa!”

  Low and dangerous, Freddie’s voice sounded from the air directly in front of the trembling Josh: he could feel the warm breath on his face. “Now you know a secret that nobody knows, and lives.”

  At that point, Josh fainted. And then Freddie had to drag the big flea-covered hulk closer to the curb, so the van could get by.

   

  * * *

   

  “A hundred thousand dollars,” Freddie said, in satisfaction, and dropped the last of the three envelopes onto the floor behind the passenger seat. He was in his messy clothing and the latex again, beside Peg as she drove.

  “That’s great, Freddie. That’ll set you up for a good long time.”

  “Set us up.”

  “Freddie, uh, there’s something I want to—”

  “Peg.” They were driving north on Tenth Avenue, and Freddie said, “Peg, I don’t think we should try to drive all the way back upstate tonight.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No. It’s almost four in the morning, we been at it all night, we’re both whipped. Let’s go home to the apartment, get a good night’s sleep, go back up there tomorrow.”

  “You may be right,” she decided.

  “I know I am.”

  “Okay.” She turned right on Forty-second Street.

  He said, “There was something you wanted to tell me?”

  “It’ll keep,” she said.

  41

  Due to various matters that were proceeding along in several cloudy corners of his life, Barney Beuler was at the moment operating seven different wiretaps within the five boroughs of the City of New York, every one of them illegal. Which meant he didn’t have the advantages of unlimited manpower he’d enjoy if these wiretaps had been ordered by a competent authority and blessed by a judge.

  Still, Barney had friends on the force who were experts in this sort of thing, who for a fee would provide him with the off-the-record man-hours and the borrowed official equipment and the expertise to set it all up, and then, with the wonders of modern technology, he didn’t even have to go personally to the bugging locations to retrieve whatever phone conversations the tapes might have picked up. It was as easy as collecting your answering machine’s messages when you’re away from home.

  The trickiest part, in fact, was finding a safe phone. Once he had one—a pay phone in an unexpected neighborhood, the home phone of an unsuspecting citizen away at work—he would attach to it his small portable digital recorder, then call his well-hidden little bugaroos in their locations all over town, and the voice-activated little darlings would give him, with no dead air, everything that had been said on that line by everybody using it since his last call, erasing themselves as they went. If there’d been no activity since his last harvest, the bugaroo would say so with a double beep and hang up.

  All in all, the seven bugaroos were a grand toy, and frequently of great use, and Barney’s only regret at the moment was that they were not yet eight. He’d spoken to his friends about adding Drs. Loomis and Heimhocker to his radio theater, and it would happen eventually, but these things always took time. He’d put in his request on Wednesday, after leaving Mordon Leethe and the doctors over at their research facility, and his contacts now told him the bugs would probably go in sometime over the weekend—weekends are the easiest times to fool with telephone equipment—and be operational no later than Monday morning. So all he could do was hope the doctors didn’t say anything really interesting this week, and meanwhile continue on with the seven bugs he did have in place.

  Two of the seven were, and had been for some time, inactive, or damn near to it, and one of those two was the bug on the phone of Peg Briscoe, in Bay Ridge. Would she ever come back? She still had the lease on the apartment, she still had the phone and the electric in her name, but did that mean anything? Maybe not, but if she did one day return, Barney wanted to be the first to know. So, three times a week, whenever he made the rounds among his bugaroos, he always included Peg Briscoe, listened to the double beep, and moved on.

  But not today. Today, Friday, July 7, at eleven in the morning, Barney worked his way through his taps, recording everything (he culled it all down to the most useful stuff la
ter, at his leisure), and when he reached the Peg Briscoe number he got: “Dr. Lopakne’s office.”

  Barney sat up straight at the desk. He had settled today into the office of an insurance salesman in Woodside, Queens, a man who had announced on his street-facing office door that he would be away for these two weeks on vacation. Barney, his elbows splayed over the insurance man’s application forms, listened avidly for the next voice, and bingo:

  “This is Peg Briscoe. Is the doctor there?”

  “He is with a patient right now.”

  “I used to be his dental technician, and—”

  “Yes, I know. This is Hilda.”

  “Oh, Hilda, hi! I didn’t recognize your voice.”

  “I recognized yours.”

  “Well, I told you my name. Anyway, what I was calling about, do you think the doctor might need me again?”

  “We’ve got a part-timer that’s not so—”

  “Part-time would be fine.”

  “Starting when?”

  “Next week, whenever.”

  “Can the doctor get back to you?”

  “No, I’ll be in and out. I tell you what, I’ll call back Monday morning. Is that good?”

  “Fine. Be nice to have you back with us, Peg.”

  “Thanks, Hilda, be nice to be back.”

  Then the robot voice, male, vaguely southwestern: “Friday, July seven, nine-oh-four A.M.”

  beep beep

  Two hours ago.

   

  * * *

   

  “May I ask who’s calling, please?”

  “Barney.”

  “Mr. Barney, may I ask what your call is in reference to?”

  “No, you may not. You may just tell Mr. Leethe that Mr. Barney is on the line. He’ll want to know.”

  A long silence, dreadfully long, three minutes, four minutes on hold. Rotten bitch. Barney’s fingernails tap-tap-tapped on the insurance man’s forms, leaving little scimitar-shaped indentations.

  “Barney?”

  “There you are!”

  “What on earth did you say to my girl?”

  “I told her I’d sew shut every opening in her body if she didn’t put you on the phone.”

  “I almost believe you.”

  “Write down this number. Seven one eight, seven nine seven, seven, nine, three, three. Go to a pay phone. Call me. Fast.”

  Barney hung up. He stood and paced the floor between the filing cabinets and the blinds over the windows concealing the view of—and from—Roosevelt Boulevard.

  The phone rang. Barney leaped to catch it on the first ring, before the insurance man’s answering machine could come into play. “Yes!”

  “Barney, I hope this is worth the—”

  “Briscoe’s back.”

  Satisfying silence from the pay phone.

  Barney smiled. “I thought that would get your attention. She made a phone call from the Bay Ridge apartment two hours ago, trying to get her old job back. Do you tobacco people have goons?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Tough guys. Muscle. What do you college-educated boys call such people?”

  “All right, all right, I understand.”

  “We don’t want him slipping by us. We gotta go in and cover everything, fast and hard. You come along, and two, three, four—”

  “Me? Barney, I’m not—”

  “You’re not clean, Leethe, don’t hold your skirts up. You be there with as many soldiers as the tobacco company can give you. It’s—shit, it’s twenty after eleven. Can you be there at one? At the corner where the bodega is.”

  “We’ll be there,” Leethe promised.

   

  * * *

   

  Muscle in suits; will wonders never cease. Lightweight summer suits, and light summer ties, and short-sleeved white shirts. Barney looked at the three guys Leethe had brought along, and all of them had, when you looked past the Little Lord Fauntleroy uniforms, necks wider than their ears, foreheads with shelves, and hands and arms that looked like fence posts. Barney laughed. “I like your style, guys,” he said, and turned to Leethe. “Do they know the story?”

  “I’m not sure I know the story.”

  “Do they know he’s invisible?” Barney demanded, getting impatient.

  One of the tough guys said, “Yes. We don’t believe it, but we know it.”

  “Believe it,” Barney told him. “What we’re going to do, we’re going to bust straight in. It’s the third-floor rear, with an air shaft that doesn’t help anybody, but windows at the back. We go in, we quick shut the door behind us, Leethe, you sit on the floor with your back against the door, you holler if anything happens.”

  “I’m sure I will.”

  “The rest of us, we secure the windows. We make sure nobody leaves when we come in, not out through anything you can use for an exit. Once we’ve got the place secure, we will find Mr. Invisible Man.”

  “Sounds good,” said the skeptic.

  “No time like the present,” Barney said, and led the charge.

   

  * * *

   

  Barney had long since acquired keys that would fit the Briscoe building’s front door and the Briscoe apartment. If you could ease in quietly, surround your subject before your subject knew what’s what, why not? Why go crash-bang, if you didn’t have to? Why not leave that stuff to the feds?

  Of course, these thugs in suits weren’t exactly quiet, not even just walking up the stairs. They did sound as though demolition was going on somewhere in the neighborhood. Barney, leading the way, had the two keys in his hand, and had both locks of the apartment door unlocked when the thugs arrived, so they didn’t even have to break stride.

  Barney pushed open the door and moved fast, looking neither left nor right, running like the fat man he was straight into the bedroom and across to stand with his back pressed against one of the two closed windows there. One of the thugs took the other window. Leethe had presumably obeyed orders and was now seated on the floor in the living room, his back against the closed front door. The windows in the living room looked out on the useless air shaft—no way up, no exit below—and the other two goons would be at the other two windows, one each in the kitchen and bathroom.

  And Briscoe wasn’t here. Barney hadn’t concerned himself at first with anything but securing the apartment, but now, having accomplished that part, he could consider the fact he hadn’t seen Briscoe on the way in, and didn’t hear her yelling in either the kitchen or bathroom. So she wasn’t here.

  Gone to lunch? Both these windows, in the July heat, were closed, though the room wasn’t very stuffy. Been here, recently, like the phone tap said. Gone again? Freddie Noon still here?

  Moving away from his window, Barney told the thug at the other one, “Go get that chair. If either of these windows starts to open, swing the chair at the space in front of it, and give me a holler.”

  “Right.”

  Barney left the bedroom, stuck his head in the bathroom, and saw the goon there standing in the tub, which was the way to cover that window, which was also closed. “Good,” he said to the goon, who looked faintly embarrassed, like an elephant with its foot stuck in a bucket.

  Barney went on to the kitchen. Window closed. Refrigerator turned on, but nothing in it. Ice-cube trays in the freezer, slushy water, not ice yet. He picked up a wrinkled dish towel with deep long vertical pleats in it from the counter beside the refrigerator, and knew what that meant. They’d turned the refrigerator off, expecting to be gone a long time. They’d propped the door open, then kept the freezer open by tying the handles of both refrigerator and freezer doors together with this towel. Then, this morning, Peg Briscoe filled the ice-cube trays, switched on the refrigerator, and tossed the towel on the counter.

  Barney tossed the towel on the counter. She had been here. She was gone now. She would come back.

  The kitchen goon leaned his back against the kitchen window, fol
ded his arms, and watched Barney at work. This was the skeptic, and nothing so far had dimmed his skepticism. Which Barney couldn’t care less about. “Okay,” Barney told him, “let’s us go outa here arm in arm.”

  The goon obediently linked his arm with Barney’s, and they moved to the kitchen door, both with their other hands out to the side walls. “He isn’t here,” Barney decided, and shut the kitchen door.

  “I guess not,” said the skeptic.

  Barney grunted. “Wait in the bedroom.”

  The skeptic raised an eyebrow, but went away to the bedroom while Barney collected the elephant from the bathtub, the two of them exiting the bathroom in such a way that nobody invisible could slide past them.

  Once outside, Barney shut that door as well, then he and the elephant went into the bedroom, where first Barney searched the nearly empty closet while one of the goons made sure by swinging a broom handle that there wasn’t anybody under the bed, and then the four of them scanned the room and came back out to the living room, where Leethe sat slumped on the floor like an earthquake victim trying to decide who to sue.

  “One room to go,” Barney said, shutting the bedroom door behind himself.

  From where he sat, Leethe would be able to see all the closed doors, while Barney and the three goons did a modified version through the living room of the World Famous Radio City Music Hall Rockettes, at the end of which they were all gathered around the crumpled Leethe as though they were the cowboys and he the fire.

  Leethe looked up, his expression as skeptical as that of the skeptical goon. “Having fun, Barney?”

  “She was here this morning,” Barney said.

  “She isn’t here now.”

  “Neither’s the guy,” said the skeptic.

  Barney said, “She told the place where she wants her job back, she’ll call Monday morning. She just started up the refrigerator here, she’d had it off for a while. She’s coming back. Where’s she going to make that call from, Monday morning? Here. Where are we gonna be, Monday morning, Mr. Leethe? Three guesses.”

  42

  Two cars drove north out of New York City, even as Barney and his friends prepared to toss the Peg Briscoe apartment. One of them was Peg’s van, driven by Peg, with Freddie beside her, completely dressed. He’d decided to be the Ayatollah Khomeini today, God knew why. Or maybe Allah knew. The other car was a Hertz rental, obtained at the deep discount offered executives of NAABOR, and driven by Dr. Peter Heimhocker, with Dr. David Loomis in the passenger seat beside him.