“I am not a cop anymore,” he said.
“That’s exactly what I want. I can’t talk about this with an actual cop. You don’t have any duty to perform.”
“None whatsoever,” he said. “It’s a grand lifestyle.”
“Yeah, I envy you. You know that. Really, what I need is a friend’s perspective. Okay?”
“Then, indeed, you came to the right place. Fire away.”
So I told J.W. about the murders of Walt Duffy and Ben Frye, about the Meriwether Lewis letters, about the latenight phone calls and the fires, about getting mugged in my parking garage, about my session with Agent Randall, about the Spotted Owl Liberation Front.
And then I told him about how I got my new cell phone and the call I’d received on it. “I know I should get ahold of Agent Randall and dump it on her lap,” I said. “But . . .?” I left it as a question.
J.W. didn’t say anything.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said finally.
“I can’t tell you what to do,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “I’ve been trying to analyze it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes analysis helps.”
I laughed. “Sometimes?”
“Lemme ask you a question,” he said.
“Ask away.”
“When you analyze this thing, and when you conclude that you should turn the whole deal over to the FBI, how does it make you feel?”
“Feel?” I said. “It makes me feel . . . nervous. Jumpy. Unsettled.”
“It doesn’t feel right?”
“No, I guess not.”
“You don’t trust the cops, huh?”
“Oh, I guess I trust them. But . . .”
“But their priorities are different than yours,” he said.
“This is the guy that already killed two people,” I said. “He could kill anybody. Me, somebody I love . . .”
“A crazy person,” said J.W. “Deranged.”
“Oh, talking to him, he sounds sane enough. But he burns down buildings and kills people.”
“That could be a pretty good definition of deranged,” said J.W. “See, Brady, the problem with cops is, they’re always looking for patterns and clues, trying to understand cause and effect, stuff like that. Rational stuff.”
I found myself nodding. “I guess that’s what’s bothering me. It’s not that I don’t respect cops.”
“They’re not infallible,” said J.W. “I oughta know. I was a cop myself. This guy who’s calling you. He sounds smart and crazy. Nasty combination. You don’t have any idea who it could be?”
“No,” I said. “He seems to know a lot about me, though. And he disguises his voice. That probably means I’d recognize it if he spoke normally.”
“He got into your apartment building. He was probably the one who swiped your wallet and your briefcase. He’s studied up on you.”
“I should do what he says, then,” I said. “Leave the cops out of it. That what you’re saying?”
“Is that what you want me to say?”
“Jesus, J.W.”
“No, I mean it. You called me. What did you want from me?”
“Perspective, I guess.”
“What if I told you flat out to call the cops, give ’em that cell phone, and wash your hands of the whole thing? Would you do it?”
I hesitated. “I don’t know.”
“Would you have regretted calling me in the first place if that’s what I said?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Because it doesn’t feel right.”
“I guess so.”
“So you already know what you want to do, right?”
“I know how I feel,” I said. “But I don’t know if it’s the right thing.”
“Yes, you do,” he said. “A very wise person once said to me: For most decisions, give it deep analytical thought, then do what your head tells you to do. But for really important decisions, you’ve got to listen to your heart.”
“Do what feels right,” I said.
“This is a pretty important decision, huh?”
“It sure feels like it,” I said.
“Your heart’s telling you to leave the cops out of it, right?”
“For now, at least. Yes.”
“Then that’s probably what you should do.”
I blew out a long breath. “I don’t know, man.”
“Look,” said J.W. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t get some help. I’m just saying you’ve got to be damn careful whose help you ask for.”
“I trust Horowitz.”
“Yeah,” said J.W., “except he’s part of that FBI bunch. You say something to him, you can’t expect him not to take it to that agent.”
“I should just wait, then,” I said. “Don’t make a decision until I’m sure of it. Do nothing for now.”
“Doing nothing is a decision, too,” he said.
“It feels like the right decision.”
“For what it’s worth,” said J.W., “if it was me, I think that’s what my heart would be saying. I’d play it by ear. If this guy wanted to kill you, he’d’ve probably tried it by now. I studied up on these psychos when I was with the cops. For some reason, he’s decided you’re a challenge. It’s personal for him. He’s playing with you. The way you like to play with fish on that little toy fly rod of yours. He’s got you hooked, and he’s enjoying it, him pulling one way, you thrashing around, pulling back. Why not string him along for a while, see what you can figure out.”
“String him along how?” I said.
“Psychos like this guy,” said J.W., “once they got you beat, reeled you in and you’re flopping on the beach with your gills flapping, gasping for air, they’re done with you. You’ve got to give him a tussle. Don’t give in to him. Don’t lose your temper. It’s a fine line. You don’t want to piss him off. Do what he says, but don’t give in to him. He wants to beat you mentally. That’s his power game.”
“It sounds like an extremely fine line,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “You’re angling for time, so to speak. Try to figure out where he’s headed with all this. When the time comes to call in the cavalry, you’ll know it.”
“How will I know?”
“Keep paying attention to your heart,” he said. “It’s hardwired to your subconscious. It picks up on all the subtle vibes, the tiny little nuances and clues that don’t quite register with the rational part. Your heart knows things that your mind doesn’t know.”
“So who is the wise person who explained that to you?” I said.
“Zee,” he said. “Wisest person I know. Listen. When this is over, you and Evie come down for a weekend. We’ll catch us a keeper-sized striper, and if they’re not biting, we’ll rake some quahogs, dig some clams, make a pitcher of martinis, have us a feast from the sea.”
“You’re on.”
“You better be careful,” he said. “Zee would kill me if something happened because I gave you bad advice.”
Henry and I walked to the office. I had the damn cell phone in my pants pocket. I was acutely aware of it. It was just a sliver of a thing and weighed about as much as my car keys, but it felt like I was lugging around a hand grenade that might explode at any minute.
Julie was sitting at her desk when we got there. She made a big point of looking at her watch.
“Don’t start on me,” I said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
I poured myself some coffee and took it into my office. Henry followed me.
I took the cell phone out of my pocket, put it on my desk, and sat down. I hoped I wasn’t making a mistake, not telling Horowitz about it.
I lit a cigarette and called Evie at her office. When she answered, I said, “Your place tonight, right? Usual time?”
“Hi. Yes. Kinda busy here, Brady.”
“Do you mind if we stick close to home this weekend?”
“Well, okay,” she said. “But I thought . . .”
Earlier in the week we had ta
lked about piling into my car on Saturday morning, cranking the sun roof open, loading up the CD player with a lot of good ol’ rock ‘n’ roll, and spending the weekend driving the back roads of Vermont, finding an out-of-the-way bed-and-breakfast, prospecting for old hand-carved decoys in village antique shops, maybe stopping to cast a fly on one of those lovely little Vermont trout streams that spill out of the Green Mountains and seem to meander along the edge of every pasture and pass under every dirt road on their way to the Connecticut River.
“I got some things going on,” I told her. “I’ll explain when I see you.”
“Fine,” she said. “See you tonight. Gotta go.”
I hung up. That was easy.
The damn cell phone sat there on my desk with its little green light blinking at me. I felt as if the man with the muffled voice was watching me through that green eye.
I tried to concentrate on the stack of papers Julie had left for me. It was slow going. I couldn’t get that voice out of my head.
J.W. said the man with the voice was playing with me, enjoying it. Crazy, deranged, unpredictable, J.W. had called him. He killed people.
What did he want with me?
Julie came into my office around noon. When she came over to my desk to collect the papers I’d piled into the out box, she recoiled as if a weasel had poked its head out of its hole and snapped its teeth at her. “What the hell is that?” she said. She pointed at the cell phone.
“Oh, that,” I said. “It’s a telephone.”
“It’s a cellular phone,” she said. “You hate cellular phones. Is it yours?”
“Sort of.”
She grinned. “Well, finally. I never expected you to enter the twenty-first century. But I’ll be darned if you haven’t at least crawled into the twentieth. Congratulations.”
“I haven’t. Not really.”
“Do you realize how much easier this will make my life?” she said. “I’ve been begging you to get a cell phone. What a lovely surprise.”
“Julie,” I said, “this is not for business.”
“What are you talking about? That’s exactly what cell phones are for.”
“It’s not really my phone, and I can’t say any more about it.”
“Are you carrying it around with you?”
I nodded.
“Well, give me the number.”
“No. I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Please,” I said. “Forget about the cell phone. I didn’t mean for you to see it.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t want to receive any calls on it?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Will you at least use it to make calls?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You’re carrying around this phone, but you’re not going to use it? You intend to continue waiting in line at pay phones in courthouse lobbies? You will continue to be entirely out of touch when you’re out walking or driving your car or off fishing somewhere? Is that it?”
“That’s it,” I said. “I like being out of touch. We’ve talked about this a hundred times.”
“It doesn’t make any sense.”
I shrugged.
She picked up the phone.
“Put it down,” I said.
She hastily put it back on my desk, then lifted her hands in a gesture of surrender.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t explain it to you.”
Julie shook her head. “Sometimes you are a profound disappointment to me, Brady Coyne.”
“Sometimes,” I said, “I’m a profound disappointment to me, too.”
TWENTY
The cell phone sat silently on my desk with its little green light winking, and after a while I stopped thinking about it. I spent the day catching up on phone calls and plowing through paperwork, and around four in the afternoon Julie tapped on my office door.
I called, “Enter,” and she entered.
She dropped a stack of papers beside my elbow. “This is your weekend homework. Machines are shut off. Except the coffee. I made a new pot for you on the assumption that, since you took one day off and missed the better part of another day this week, you were planning to stay and get caught up.”
I tapped the new stack of papers. “I don’t have a briefcase,” I said. “Can’t bring this stuff home.”
“That’s a good one, Brady,” she said. “Ho, ho. Do it before you leave, then.”
I gave her a salute, and she rolled her eyes. She knew I wouldn’t do any such thing.
After Julie left, I tried to return my concentration to my paperwork. Julie was right. It had piled up during the week, and if I were a conscientious attorney, I’d either stay there at my desk until it was done, or I’d bring it home with me and clean it up over the weekend. That’s what conscientious attorneys did.
I flipped through the stack of papers. There was nothing urgent. Nothing that couldn’t wait ’til Monday.
I hadn’t worked hard all my life because I wanted to end up being a conscientious attorney. I’d expended all that effort and energy so that I could become a lazy attorney, and I’d succeeded rather well.
I stuck it out until five, then said the hell with it. I straightened out the corners on those stacks of papers, stood up, stretched, went out to the reception area, turned off the coffee machine, and rinsed out the pot.
Then I went back into my office, picked up the cell phone, and slipped the damn green-eyed albatross into my pants pocket. I stood there for a minute. I recognized a familiar tension in my gut.
Listen to your heart, J.W. had said.
I listened, and my heart told me to go over to the safe behind the framed photograph of Billy and Joey. So I did. I pushed the photograph aside, spun the dial, opened the safe, reached in around the envelope that held Walt Duffy’s Meriwether Lewis letters, and took out my Smith & Wesson .38 revolver.
Once upon a time I killed two men with that gun. They were both evil men, murderers who would have killed me and the women who were with me, and in both cases I pulled the trigger and shot those men in the chest at point-blank range, and I did it without compunction or hesitation or regret.
If I ever confronted the man with the muffled voice, the man who had killed Walt Duffy and Ben Frye and who set off explosions in buildings, I guessed I could shoot him without compunction, hesitation, or regret, too.
I always kept my .38 loaded with the hammer down on an empty cylinder. If I cocked it, the cylinder would rotate. If I then pulled the trigger, the hammer would fall on a live cartridge.
A .38 hollow-point from point-blank range makes an impressive hole in a man’s chest.
I stuck the gun in my jacket pocket, and its comforting bulk seemed to neutralize the barely noticeable weight of the vile little cell phone in my pants pocket. Yin and yang.
I locked up, and Henry and I headed home. We took my favorite route down Newbury Street, across Arlington, through the Public Garden and across Charles Street, and we were approaching the duck pond on the Common when a little beep sounded in my pants.
I glanced around. It was five-thirty on a pretty June Friday afternoon, and the Boston Common swarmed with people. As usual, there were clumps of Japanese tourists snapping pictures of each other, college-aged kids playing Frisbee, secretaries and loan officers striding along in their short skirts and high heels, investment bankers and lawyers lugging home their weekend briefcases, dog owners allowing themselves to be tugged around on leashes, homeless men tossing popcorn to the pigeons and drinking from bottles in paper bags.
Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed that all of them—except the bums—had a hand pressed against an ear. They all seemed to be frowning and gesticulating with their empty hands and talking intently, as if they were very important people and the fate of the world depended on the words they chose to yell into their cellular phones.
My pants beeped again. I reached into my pocket, fished out the little phone, and flipped it open. “Yes,” I said.
“A lovely afternoon for a stroll on the Common, isn’t it?”
The sonofabitch was watching me!
I looked around. Dozens of men were talking on cell phones. Any one of them could have been the voice.
“Why don’t you come over here,” I said, “so we can talk face-to-face.”
He chuckled. “All in good time, Mr. Coyne. I simply called to wish you a happy weekend.”
“Thanks.”
“You’ll be hearing from me again,” he said. “Be sure to keep those batteries charged.”
“You bet.”
“Oh,” he said, “and when you get home, why don’t you take a peek under your car.”
“What do you—?”
But he’d disconnected.
I walked the rest of the way home peering over my shoulder with my hand in my jacket pocket cradling my .38.
Henry and I took the stairs down into my parking garage. I kept my hand in the pocket with my gun and went over to my car, which was parked in its reserved slot against the green concrete wall. Even in the middle of the day, the garage was lit only by dim orange bulbs high in the ceiling, so that it always seemed like nighttime down there.
I wondered if the voice had attached some kind of bomb to the undercarriage of my car. He blew up buildings. I figured he could blow up an automobile if he wanted to.
But why tell me about it?
I knew the answer: To show me he could do it. To impress me with his control over me. To harass me, to confuse me, to frighten me.
But why would he want to do that?
Well, I figured sooner or later I’d get my answer. I’d have to wait. For now, he was in charge.
I knelt down on the concrete floor and peered underneath my car. I saw instantly what was there.
It was my briefcase, tucked behind the left rear tire.
I slid it out, brushed it off, and put it on the hood of my car. My treasured Harlan Fiske Stone briefcase.
Maybe the bomb was in the briefcase.
Well, the hell with it. I couldn’t live my life wondering if everything I touched would explode.
I held my breath, popped the latch on the briefcase, and peered inside. It was full of papers. I took them out and riffled through them. Photocopies of legal documents. All the stuff that had been there when I was mugged. As near as I could tell, nothing had been added and nothing had been removed.
A Fine Line Page 16
