by Mike Resnick
It didn’t take that long. In about four or five minutes there was a knock at my door—the one leading to the cars, not to the interior corridor. I opened it, and two tall, slim, uniformed men—one white, one black—stepped in.
“Mr. Paxton?” said one of them.
“That’s right.”
“Lieutenant MacDonald said you were expecting us,” he continued. “I’m Officer Crosby, and this is Officer Graham.”
“I’m glad to see you,” I said. “Did either of you notice a blue Mercedes convertible in the lot?”
He shook his head. “We were specifically told to look for one.”
“Good,” I said. “Then just let me get a couple of things out of my car, and we can go to the station.”
“One moment, sir,” said Graham. “We understand you were shot at when you opened the door to go to your car?”
“That’s right.”
“I didn’t see any damage to the door. Was the shooter directly facing you?’
“No,” I said. “He was off to left.”
“Okay,” he said. “Then if the door was open, the bullet should be . . .” He walked over to the wall. “Ah! Here it is.” He turned to me. “Officer Crosby will help you empty your car. Forensics is overloaded right now, so I’ll dig it out myself and they can run it through the lab.” He grimaced. “At the rate they’re cutting budgets, I’ll be washing squad cars next month.”
“This way, Mr. Paxton,” said Crosby, ushering me out the door as Graham went to work on the wall.
I walked to the Ford, and he held my bag while I opened the trunk. There was nothing there except Tony’s back issues of the racing magazine. I figured I’d see his parents before I saw the car again, so I picked them up and tucked them under an arm, then closed the trunk, pulled my pistol out of the glove compartment, tucked it in a pocket, and followed Crosby to the police car, where Graham joined us a minute later.
We drove directly to the station, where Brenda—Bernice’s counterpart—checked us in and directed us to a room where Drew MacDonald was waiting for us.
“Thanks, guys,” he said, taking a tissue and wiping a spot from his glasses. “I’ll take it from here.”
They nodded, handed him the bullet in an evidence bag, and left the two of us alone.
“Any idea yet who it might have been?” he asked.
I shook my head. “None.” Then, “Damn it, Drew—I haven’t learned a goddamned thing! I’m no closer to finding the kid now than I was when his parents hired me.”
He smiled. “Yes, you are, Eli,” he said. “You just don’t know it.”
“Same damned thing,” I replied.
“No, it’s not,” said MacDonald. “If the kid ran off to have a good time, no one would be shooting at you.”
I nodded in agreement. “You’re right. I’d pretty much convinced myself that Tony was dead, so that didn’t register. But before it was guesswork. Now I have a valid reason to believe he’s dead.”
He held up the small plastic bag with a misshapen bullet in it. “We’ll have the forensics boys—well, actually the forensics ladies at this station—examine your valid reason in the morning. If they can’t make a positive ID, they’ll probably send it on to the state lab.”
“See if you can see who owns a blue Mercedes convertible too,” I said.
“Did you get a look at the license plate?” he asked.
“It was dark and he was shooting at me.”
“I’ll take that for a No,” he said. “That’s too bad. Still, we can draw a couple of conclusions.”
“Such as?”
“The shooter’s probably not local—or if he is, he rented the car. I mean, how the hell many blue Mercedes convertibles can there be in a city this size? I’ll put the computer to work on it, and I’ll have a list of every one of them in three minutes’ time.”
“Okay,” I said. “So what do I do now?”
“We’ll rent you a car in the morning and find you another motel, something really grubby and off by itself.”
“You make it sound like you’re paying for it.”
“I wish we could,” he said, “since you’re doing some of our work for us, but Cincinnati detectives aren’t in our budget. I’ll have them roll in a cot with a blanket, which you won’t need, and some pillows, which you also won’t need but will probably appreciate. That door there leads to the bathroom.” He paused. “If you’re as tight for money as most independent private eyes are, hell, you can use this room as a headquarters.”
“I’ll think about it,” I told him.
“Okay,” he said, walking to the door. “You want some coffee, or are you going to go right to sleep?”
I shook my head. “It’s only been twenty minutes or so since someone tried to blow my head off. I’ll need a little more time to calm down, so, yeah, a coffee would be nice.”
“I’ll be right back with it.”
I didn’t see any reason to unpack my suitcase, so I set it down on the floor, sat down at the little table that was across the room from where they were clearly going to put the cot, and started thumbing through Tony’s pile of Thoroughbred Weekly magazines.
A uniformed guy, one I hadn’t seen before, wheeled a cot into the room and opened it up. I felt like I should tip him, but I controlled the urge and just thanked him instead. He saluted, which may have been the first time any cop had saluted me since I left the Chicago force, and almost bumped into MacDonald as he left.
“Your coffee,” he said, placing it on the table next to the magazines. “Cream and sugar, right?”
“White stuff—cream, milk, half and half, powdered creamer, whatever,” I said. “And half—sugar, Sweet and Low, Equal, you name it.”
“I thought all detectives drank their coffee black,” he said with a smile.
“I thought all detectives made it with an oversexed blonde or redhead every night,” I replied, returning his smile. “Looks like we were both the victims of false doctrine.”
“By the way, I ran a check on the Mercedes,” said MacDonald. “Got to be out of town.”
“Are you seriously suggesting that no one in this town owns one?”
“No. I’m seriously suggesting that based on the list of owners, no one who’s remotely connected with either the horse or the murder business owns one. I’ll have one of our men drive around tomorrow looking for fresh marks.”
“Marks?”
“You say he bumped you off the road,” he said. “Can’t do that without leaving some scratches and dents, no matter how good you are at it.”
“I’d just about forgotten,” I admitted. “Funny how being shot at half an hour ago can make you forget what happened three or four hours ago.”
“And this was after you dropped Bernice off at her place?”
I nodded. “Right.”
“Well, he didn’t pick you up out of the blue. He must have followed you from the station to dinner, and from the restaurant to her apartment.” He grimaced. “Smacks of a pro. He doesn’t give his employer a freebie, especially a cop. He knows that if he nails one of us, we’ll never quit until we track him down.”
“I can’t tell you how comforting that is,” I said with a smile, “knowing you’d never give up if he’d shot at Bernice instead.”
“We don’t want to lose you either, Eli,” he said. “Did you remember your gun?”
“Yeah, it’s in my pocket.”
“With the safety on, I trust?”
“Hasn’t been off in something like two years.”
“Got some bullets too?”
“Whatever’s in the gun,” I said, “and maybe fifteen more.”
“That’s not a hell of a lot.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “If my first ten or twelve shots don’t kill or disable whoever’s after me, how the hell many more do you think I’m gonna have time for before he nails me?”
MacDonald laughed. “Now I’m going to spend the rest of the night wondering whether you’re a realist or
a fatalist.”
“As long as I’m a live one, I’ll settle for either,” I told him.
“Okay, Eli,” he said. “I really have to get back to work. You’re not locked in and are free to walk around if you want. Don’t go through the doorway at the left end of the corridor. It’s the drunk-and-drug tank, and they’ve pretty much shut up for the night. I’d hate to get them all screaming again.”
“Right,” I said.
“I’ll check on you in the morning before I go home and see if there’s anything you need and what you’ve decided to do.”
“I appreciate it, Drew,” I said.
Then he was gone, and I sat down at the desk, opened one of Tony’s magazines, and started reading about how the Trojan offspring would dominate the two-year-old races next year if they ran half as well as they looked. There was a nostalgic article about the first yearling to sell for more than one hundred thousand dollars, which was considerably less than the average price of the past thirty years. They named him One Bold Bid, and he ran about the way the cognoscenti expected any sales topper to run, which is to say, he retired without ever winning a stakes race.
There was an article about Trojan himself. Evidently he was breeding about one hundred and fifty mares a year, and from a photo they ran of him I’d say he was putting on a little bit of a belly, which made no sense to me. I mean, if I slept with a hundred and fifty women during the last six months of the year, there wouldn’t be enough of me left to weigh.
I read every word and looked at every picture in the two most recent issues, and then that cot started looking very inviting, so I walked over to it and lay down. I thought I’d probably lay awake for an hour or two, trying to figure out my next move, but I was asleep within a minute and didn’t budge until Lou Berger woke me just before noon.
“Drew filled me in about your little problem,” said Lou Berger as I swung my feet to the floor and sat at the edge of the cot.
“Little?” I growled.
He smiled. “Misshapen little piece of lead. Can’t be much more than half an inch long.”
“So what did it tell you?”
“That it was shot by a guy who didn’t register his gun,” was the answer.
“Big surprise,” I said.
“So what are your plans?”
“Someone wants me dead. The only two things I’ve done since I got here are guard a horse and look for a kid. The horse is probably a thousand miles away by now, so I figure I’m being shot at to stop me from looking for the kid.”
“So . . . ?”
“As far as I can see, there are only two ways to make this guy leave me alone. Run back to Cincinnati and hide there, or find the kid before he can kill me.”
“Well, there’s a third,” said Berger. “But we’d have to arrest you, though you’d probably beat the charge.”
“Not interested,” I answered. “I’m no hero. If I lived in Seattle or Boston, I’d be on my way home the minute I walk out of this building. But Cincinnati’s just ninety miles up the road, and if I go home now there’s no guarantee that he won’t be there tomorrow, or even this evening, because until the kid turns up alive or dead the hitter has no reason to stop trying to kill me. So I’ll try to find Tony before he finds me.”
“We’ll help you in any way we can,” said Berger seriously.
“I’m counting on that,” I said. “Let me start with a request: I’d like to spend the next couple of nights here at the station.”
“Well,” he said dubiously, “I suppose it saves money, but still . . .”
“It’s not about the money, Lou,” I said. “Hell, I’ll pay for the space if you want. I just want to be able to sleep for a few hours without worrying about what might be sneaking up on me.”
“Not a problem,” said Berger promptly when he realized what my reason was.
“Just leave my junk in the room here,” I said.
“Toss out the magazines?” he asked. “I see Mars Rover on one the covers. He hasn’t won a thing since February down in Florida, so it’s got to be at least three months old, and probably four.”
“No, leave ’em here,” I answered. “They belong to Tony. I’ll be dropping them at his parents’ place today or tomorrow.”
“So where do you go first?”
“Beats me,” I said. “I just woke up a couple of minutes ago.” I reached for my pack of cigarettes, then realized I’d left them in the Ford. “We got any coffee around here?”
“Yeah. It’s brewing on the shelf between the two bathrooms.”
“Thanks.” I let myself out of the room, plodded down the corridor to the men’s room, made brief use of it, and then poured myself a cup of coffee and added powdered creamer and sweetener. I took a sip and then a swallow, started feeling mildly human again, and walked back to Berger’s office, where he had just seated himself at his desk.
“Did you turn up anything on the convertible?” I asked.
He shook his head. “There are eleven blue Mercedes convertibles in town, and we’ve accounted for every one of them. There’s only one for rent, and it wasn’t out yesterday. So clearly it was from out of town, and if it was rented by our friend from New Mexico or any other hitter, he probably picked it up in Kansas or Iowa with a phony ID so we couldn’t trace it to him.”
“If it was Jimenez and he didn’t mind being seen here the night Tony vanished, why would he mind it now?”
“You’re still sleepy, aren’t you, Eli?” said Berger. “Or at least your brain is.”
“Probably,” I agreed. “But enlighten me.”
“He wasn’t shooting at anyone until last night.”
“Oh,” I said dully. “You’re right: I am too sleepy to think. If I’m leaving this particular safe house, I’d better finish this coffee and start waking up.”
“I assume you know how to take care of yourself once you’re awake,” said Berger. “But I think we’ll put a plainclothes tail on you, just to be on the safe side.”
“As long as he doesn’t spout political slogans while he’s gunning down the bad guys.”
“Are you still sleepy, or do you have reason to think there’s more than one?”
“Still sleepy,” I said. “Where can I pick up some breakfast or lunch when I leave here?”
“Can’t do any better than Tilly’s,” said Berger.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “If the shooter’s been watching me, he’ll know that I like to eat there. My Ford’s at the hotel, and it’s like driving around in a bull’s-eye, so if you can get me a different car, I’ll go someplace I haven’t been and maybe grab a meal without being shot at.”
He thought for a moment. “There’s a bunch of Bob Evans restaurants here in town. Pick one that’s not too close to the station or Bigelow’s farm and you should be all right.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Now all I have to do is figure out why I’m a target.”
“You could visit every place you’ve been the past couple of days,” he suggested. Then he shook his head. “No, that wouldn’t prove a thing. He’s already shooting at you, so if he follows you to places that have nothing to do with his reason, it won’t prove anything.”
“If it’s all the same to you, I’d just as soon not be shot at,” I said.
“Then you’re going to have to turn into Sherlock Holmes and solve this by pure deductive reasoning, because the second you visit Bigelow or Standish or the kid’s parents again, you’re a target again, like it or not. You might not know why he’s trying to kill you, but he sure as hell knows, and that means you’ve already given him his reason.”
“I know,” I said. “But that’s crazy. I’ve talked to a couple of trainers, a couple of grooms, a couple of parents, and a girlfriend. Nobody knows anything. I’ll stake my life on it.”
Berger sighed deeply. “In case it’s escaped your notice, you already have.”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” I complained. “They answered everything I asked. Nobody ducked, and I know if
I’d had lie detectors on them they’d all have passed.”
“Has it occurred to you that maybe you didn’t ask them the right questions?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that no one tried to kill you three days ago, or two days. All you’ve done is go around asking questions. Maybe if you’d asked the right one, you’d know why you’ve become a target.”
“That makes sense when you say it,” I said. “But what the hell else could I have asked?”
“Beats me,” said Berger. “I wasn’t there. But clearly he thinks you know something you shouldn’t know.”
And an hour and a half later, when I put aside the sports section of the Lexington paper and finished my third cup of coffee to go along with my second cheese Danish at a Bob Evans a dozen miles from the station, I still didn’t know.
I suppose what it came down to is that I had more confidence in the shooter than I had in myself. Which is to say, I was sure he hadn’t made a mistake, and that means I had—if not a mistake, at least an error of omission. There was something I should have asked that he figured a competent detective would have asked, and the answer to it, or possibly the mere fact that I knew enough to ask it, was reason enough to kill me.
I had no leads at all on Tony’s disappearance, or Billy Paulson’s either . . . and in fact, if the two were linked it was by the most improbable of connections, that they both rubbed the same horse.
Well, maybe that wasn’t the only link. They’d both worked for Mill Creek. Maybe they’d each learned something, maybe even the same thing, about Bigelow, something he didn’t want anyone to know, something that could put him in the poorhouse even quicker than he seemed to be heading for it.
Of course, that would mean that these two uneducated kids had discovered something that no one else in Bigelow’s employ had hit upon, and while he wasn’t surrounded by geniuses, he’d had a couple of pretty competent managers in Chessman and Standish. I knew he had an accountant, and he probably had maids and butlers. I’d met one of his gofers; there had to be more. It was difficult to think that only Tony and Billy had the pure deductive powers to unearth whatever it was they had unearthed.
