Safe House (25 page)

“Sure.”

Crystal Beth walked barefoot to her closet and came out with a pair of hot-pink spikes with a little round black dot inset on each toe. “Four-and-a-half-inch heels,” she said, grinning. “They make me really tall.”

“They’re, uh . . . remarkable,” I said, struggling for the right word and missing it.

“I can’t imagine where I’d wear them. Or what I’d wear them with. Vyra says I’m lucky. That I have such small feet.”

“Is that genetic too?”

“I think so. My mother had tiny feet. Not my father, though. You want to see how they look?”

“Sure.”

She slipped the shoes on her feet and paraded around a bit, pulling up her slacks at the ankles so the shoes could be displayed. “Do you think they look silly?” she asked me.

“It’s hard to tell this way,” I said, scratching my chin, deep in thought. “Try it with the pants off,” I advised her solemnly.

I
t was almost four when the phone rang. This time it was an address on West Fifty-sixth. An office building, if I remembered the block right. I scooped Herk out of the basement and we hiked west to Eighth Street near NYU. Then we grabbed the N train to Fifty-seventh, and walked over to the address Pryce had given me.

There was an attendant in the lobby, but he didn’t pay any attention to us as we walked toward the elevator. I quickly scanned the tenant directory, but I couldn’t see anything next to 1401. We rode up anyway.

The hall carpet had been fresh when you could still buy a De Soto in a showroom. The walls were a dingy shade of layered nicotine. The overhead lighting alternated between pus-yellow and missing as we moved along the corridor. The office doors were a uniform dull brown, identified by the remnants of gilt decals displaying the numbers. We found 1401 just past a right-angle turn in the corridor, standing alone next to a window overlooking an air shaft. The window was the kind of stained glass you don’t see in churches.

I rapped lightly on the door. The man who opened it was a little taller than me, with thinning light-brown hair and watery blue eyes. He raised his eyebrows like he expected me to say something. I didn’t.

“You’re—?”

“Yeah,” I told him, moving past him into the office. Herk was right on my shoulder. I heard the door close behind us.

We were in what once had been a waiting room. The back wall was a receptionist’s booth, complete with a sliding-glass window cut into the wall. Both empty. I opened the door beside the receptionist’s window. Pryce was in the next room, seated behind a wood desk in one of those green vinyl swivel chairs they gave typists in the Fifties. He stood up when we walked in.

“Let’s get started,” he said.

We followed him to another room. It was small and square, with a nausea-colored linoleum floor and a single window that had been painted over with that silver stuff they use on bathroom glass. The only furniture was a knock-down card table with a clear glass ashtray on it and four black metal folding chairs. The walls were bare, painted an off-white that years of neglect had degenerated into just “off.”

Pryce gestured for me to pick a chair. I took the one with its back to the window, nodding at Herk to sit on my right. Pryce sat with his back to the door, leaving Lothar to face Herk.

I handed him photocopies of the printouts I’d gotten from Wolfe. He scanned through them, eyebrows going up slightly when he came to the substituted pages. He handed the dead man’s photo to Lothar without a word.

Lothar looked at the photo and nodded in recognition. Then he said the dead man’s name.

Damn.

“Did you know him well?” I asked Lothar quickly, keeping my face calm.

“Only met him a couple, three times,” Lothar said smoothly, looking at Pryce for approval. “That was the way we worked it.”

“And when do you get the word?”

He looked at Pryce, who said: “Tuesday, there’ll be a message at the drop. From Hercules. You’ll turn it over—not the physical message, you’ll destroy that—to the others. Offer to meet with Hercules yourself. They’ll tell you to bring him someplace. Or they’ll tell you to go there alone, but they’ll be there too.”

“They might—”

“No they won’t,” Pryce cut him off. “They’ll
have
to find out. It’s too close. Now, what you need to do is spend the next couple of hours together. Get familiar with each other, like I told you. This will be the last chance you get.”

“How about a beer?” Lothar said to Herk, standing up.

“Okay, brother,” Herk replied, following him out of the room.

W
e sat in silence until I heard the sound of a door close somewhere to my right. Then I leaned forward and dropped my best card on the table, my one shot at getting Crystal Beth out of the line of fire.

“We don’t have to do this anymore,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“The threat to you is Lothar getting busted when he comes in on the divorce thing, right?” I asked, keeping my voice so low Pryce had to twist his head to turn his ear toward me—no chance they could hear us in the next room. “But if we just
wait,
” I told him, “it all fixes itself. And I can get that done now.”

“Explain,” he said, voice even lower than mine.

“The woman doesn’t go in. I don’t care if it’s all set up or not. She just doesn’t go in. Not now. Her lawyer gets an adjournment, whatever. How long is this gonna take, anyway? Another two weeks, three weeks?”

“I don’t know. I told you, I don’t know the date that they intend to—”

“Whatever. It won’t be long, you know that much. All we have to do is wait. Why do we need all this undercover stuff now? I can
guarantee
you the woman will wait. And that’s all she has to do. When this thing they’re planning goes down,
then
she makes her move. And Lothar, he just defaults—doesn’t show up at all. They can issue all the warrants they want for him—he’ll be underground, right? Gone for good. And that’ll get her everything she wants. Once he disappears, she’s free.”

“How can you make that guarantee? You don’t even know the woman’s name,” he said, watching my face. “Or, even if you do, you don’t know where she is. You may control that . . . other woman, but not the one that counts.”

“Wherever she is, she’s
dependent,
” I said. “She’s not going to be able to do this by herself. She needs the others. That’s the way it works. There’s a whole support system. Not just money—she needs emotional support too. She’s safe where she is. Her baby too. It may be a little tense, but it’s not dangerous. She can wait. When this started, you wanted the whole thing called off. Well, we don’t have to call it off, right? All we have to do is delay it. For as long as you want.”

“It’s not that simple,” Pryce said. “Too much time has gone by. He—Lothar—is getting nervous. Not about the others—he’s very confident there. About me. He wants something from me. A show of strength.”

“What’s that got to do with—?”

“He wants to see his son.”

T
he weather changed in the room. The baby. I felt little dots of orange behind my eyes. My hands wanted to clench into fists. I pictured my center. Saw it start to fracture. Pulled it into a latticework, holding it with my will. I turned the blossoming rage into ugly green smoke, let it pass through the lattice. To somewhere else. Tested my voice in my head until it sounded calm, all the jagged edges rounded into smoothness. Then I let it out.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said, checking the audio on my voice to be sure it was calm and peaceful. “He can’t take the kid into the cell. Even if he has someone who’d take care of the baby, he’d never get him back once the wheels come off.”

“He doesn’t want to take him,” Pryce replied. “Not now. He just wants to
see
him.”

“To be sure you can deliver?”

“Yes. He knows I can handle the . . . other part. After all, we need his cooperation, so he can expect to be treated very well. But the . . . government doesn’t know where his wife and baby are.”

“And neither do you,” I said, getting it for the first time.

He shrugged, as if it were a minor problem. One he could expect to have solved sooner or later.

“And that’s what the threats were all about, huh? It was never about delaying some scam divorce. That was the deal you made with him—that you’d find his kid. And maybe—yeah!—and deliver the kid when he goes away. Hand him right over.”

He shrugged again.

“But if he brings Herk in, he’s skewered. You’d have your own source. If he rats Herk out, he goes down too.”

Another shrug.

“Very nice,” I told him, meaning it. “But I can get what I want without doing anything now. You might have threatened Crystal Beth into getting the woman to drop the divorce thing, but you know you don’t have enough horsepower to make them give up the baby. Let’s go back to where we started. Forget the divorce. It’s not gonna happen, okay? Lothar won’t come in. He won’t get busted. You play out your own string.”

“It’s too late for that,” Pryce said. “I have to have that baby. For an hour. Two hours, tops.”

“Can’t do it,” I told him.

“You said you had total control of—”

“It doesn’t matter anymore. Everyone has limits. That would be hers.”

“I don’t care about hers,” he said quietly. “Only about yours. We have a deal. What you get is your friend Hercules. Vanished. With full immunity.”

“That’d be good. But we can live without it.”

“There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

“What murder?”

He idly fingered the photo of the dead man, not saying a word.

“That’s a guess,” I told him. “Not an indictment.”

He looked up at the ceiling, like he was seeking divine guidance. “Everybody’s been lying to you, Burke,” he said. “When you see your girlfriend, ask her about Rollo’s.”

“What about Rollo’s?”

“You think she was a stranger there? They’re all part of it.”

“Part of what?”

“Her network. This Mimi, the one who runs the place. Her. The bouncer, T.B. Rusty, the big guy who sits in a corner and draws pictures. Even her husband.”

“Crystal Beth has a—”

“Not her, Mimi. Her husband is the owner of the place. He never goes there, but he owns it. And half a dozen others like it, all around the country.”

“So he owns a few bars, what—?”

“Not bars. Nerve centers. He’s one of the bankrollers, like this Vyra person. But it’s Crystal Beth who’s in charge. This stalking thing, it’s out of control. So many people just living in terror. It was only a matter of time before they banded together. Your friend Crystal Beth, she’s running a lot more than you think.”

“So she’s a liar,” I said. “So they’re all liars. It doesn’t matter. I’m out of this now. Why should I help you get your hands on that baby?”

“This immunity thing, it’s really quite wonderful,” Pryce said smoothly. “You can always trade
up.
Give prosecutors a homicide, they’ll give you a pass on a whole bunch of other stuff.”

“So?”

He picked up the photo of the dead man again, held it like it was a delicate shard of spun glass. “So it’s all a chain. But I hold the link that can snap it. If you don’t believe me, maybe you should ask Anthony LoPacio.”

“Who the hell is Anthony LoPacio?”

“Ah, that’s right. You probably know him by some other name. Try ‘Porkpie.’ ”

I
lit a cigarette to buy time, not surprised that my hands didn’t tremble—I was dead inside. My brainstem felt clogged with all the messages. Only one came through clearly, acid-burning all the others out of the way.

Murder would fix this.

A pair of murders. Right here. Right now.

I looked up at Pryce, feeling my eyes go soft and wet. My eyes were Wesley’s now, watching prey. I was born a motherless gutter rat. And when I’m cornered . . .

He saw where he was walking. His Adam’s apple bobbed a couple of times. The muscle jumped under his eye. “There’s another way,” he said softly, playing for his life, putting his hands flat on the table, palms down. “We can be partners.”

I
listened to every word he said, pushing killing him and his boy Lothar behind a door in my mind. But I left the door ajar. Then I went over the deal. Again and again.

Summed up:

Even if he was telling the truth, even if he was the only one who was, he’d walk away with all the cards.

And he could always come back and play them again.

“Why should I trust you?” I asked him.

“Because you know what
I
want . . . and because I’m the only one in this whole thing you can say that about,” he told me. “The rest of them all have their games. Whether they want to save the world or destroy it, what difference? You and I, we’re professionals. I can’t do this without you, okay? And you can’t get what you need done without me either.”

I kept his eyes, but my mind went walking. Years ago, I did time with an Indian. He had some tribal name, but he never used it Inside. We called him Hiram. He told me a lot of stuff, and I always listened. Hiram told me that there was no separate Chickasaw tribe—“Chickasaw” was just the Cherokee name for “once were here, now are gone”—those who chose war as a way of life. The last to fall to the white man’s guns—but the first to “adapt,” which was why the BIA began calling them one of the “Civilized Tribes” as they walked the Trail of Tears. But Hiram said they were just biding their time then, waiting.

And some of their children’s children still were.

Hiram told me there was no tribe called Seminoles either. That was just a name laid on them by Andrew Jackson . . . before he shipped them out to Oklahoma, where they could join the survivors from the Trail of Tears. What they really were was part of the Creek nation Jackson drove down into Florida from the Georgia border.

He said some of their children were still waiting too. Maybe, if the tribes hadn’t warred with each other, if they’d ever joined forces, the whole thing would have come out different.

Hiram told me something else too. He said the badger and the coyote sometimes hunt together. In the high Northwest, in winter, when game gets scarce. The coyote has the better eyes, but he can’t penetrate the rock-hard ground. And the badger can only see close-up. So the coyote would spot the prey, and alert the badger. Then the badger would dig it out, and they’d share the kill.