Silencer (37 page)

Rhees said, ‘We could go somewhere –'

‘And hide? I can't live that way, John. Sorry.'

Rhees sighed. ‘It's in the hands of the cops, Amanda. That's what really riles you. You've been decommissioned.'

‘No, what riles me is the idea of doing nothing,' she said. ‘And with respect to Sergeant Gannon, I don't feel very secure.'

Dansk's presence in the pines, his head filled with murderous notions, birds disturbed, wings suddenly fluttering through branches – no, she couldn't go through with that, waiting and waiting.

Gannon alone wasn't enough. She'd need more than Gannon's shotgun and the Colt in his holster before she could feel remotely secure. ‘Pass me your mobile.'

Gannon handed her the unit with a little gesture of reluctance.

Rhees asked, ‘Who do you intend to call?'

Amanda began to tap numbers. ‘I want Dansk out of our lives, John. I want to hand him over to Kelloway and say, Here, here's the elusive Dansk for you, Chief. Why don't you grill him for answers? Why don't you shine a big bright fucking light in his eyes and make him talk? I just want things back the way they were before.'

Rhees said, ‘Before? Remind me, Amanda. Refresh my memory.'

‘It was a good life and I want it to be good again. It's that simple.'

‘What is it really, Amanda? You feel you have some kind of appointment with Dansk you're desperate to keep?'

An appointment with Dansk, that was one way of putting it. But it had to be on her own terms and her own territory. ‘I'm not running from this situation. Somebody else might, but not me.'

Rhees's voice was dry and flat and suffused with resignation. ‘It's all or nothing with you, Amanda. It's always been that way.'

‘You get to a point where you're sick of fear, and I've reached that point, John. I've reached it and I've outstripped it and I'm tired.'

She finished punching in the number that would connect her with Kelloway.

68

Dansk felt the darkness was fevered in some way. If the night was a human being, it would be running a temperature. He glanced at the Ruger on the passenger seat. The power of a gun. The stunning velocity of a bullet, the implosion of an eye, the demolition of brain tissue, flakes of bone spitting through the back of Loeb's head into the tangerine light, Morgan Scholes crumpling like an empty grocery bag. Death delivered in an instant. Life and death locked in an ammunition clip locked in a chamber locked in your fist. All that lethal energy. Death compacted and compressed in pointed cylinders.

You killed Loeb. You killed Morgan Scholes. No inner turmoil, no conflict with your conscience, no great upheaval of the heart. Just point the gun and pull the trigger. Real easy.

Somewhere far to his right a firework went off. A solitary burst of bright purple light, then a fine spray as the power ebbed out of the thing and it fell to earth. Some kid with a firework he'd probably smuggled back from Mexico. Dansk retained the impression behind his eyes for a few miles, a firefly flutter of powdered light.

He pulled into a gas station, got out of his car and approached the office. The old guy who appeared in the doorway had a discoloured glass eye. Dansk noticed the fake eye was blue-grey and the white around it viscous, milky.

‘'Bout to close up,' the old guy said. ‘You got me just in time.' He shuffled out to the pumps and began to fill Dansk's car. ‘See some eejit set off a firework. You get these drunk kids out in the woods. They don't think fire hazards. You just passing through?'

For ever, Dansk thought. He said, ‘Yeah. Passing through.'

‘'Bout all Flag's good for these days, passing through. One time it was different. Air up here used to be sweeter than honey in my day.' He closed the gas cap.

Dansk followed the man inside the office, which was also a storeroom. It smelled of grease and rubber and stewed coffee. He spotted a Coke machine that issued soda in glass bottles. He asked for change and inserted enough coins for two bottles. He looked round the place, bought a flashlight, a box of Kleenex, 36 inches of clear plastic tubing, a bottle-opener, a disposable lighter and the largest wrench he could find.

The old guy rang the items up on his cash register. Dansk paid. Outside, a car idled near the darkened pumps, then drove away quickly in a squeal of rubber.

‘I guess that's one fellow decided he don't need gas,' the old guy said, ‘or else he's in an almighty hurry, like everybody else these days.'

Dansk stepped outside, clutching his purchases, seeing tail-lights glow like cast-off cigarette butts down the highway.

69

Inside McTell's car Pasquale said, ‘I gotta call Loeb, tell him it's done.'

‘You attached it OK?' McTell asked.

‘While Dansk was in the gas station. The thing's magnetic.' Pasquale removed his phone from his pocket and dialled Loeb's number. There wasn't an answer. He let it ring for a while. ‘Funny, he said he'd wait to hear from me.'

‘So he split. Back home probably. It's no big deal.'

‘This whole thing's gone weird,' Pasquale remarked.

‘You get new orders direct from Loeb, you go through with them. Nothing weird about that.'

Pasquale sighed. ‘Loeb isn't a healthy guy, Eddie. I never seen a human look like that since my Uncle Bill on my mother's side croaked from pneumonia. He's like this zombie colour.'

‘The only colour interests me is money,' McTell said.

Pasquale took a thick white envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘Twenty thou in crisp hundreds. Severance pay, Loeb calls it. We get the second instalment afterwards.'

‘Yo, May-eee-co,' said McTell. ‘
Arriba arriba
!'

‘Yeah,' said Pasquale, ‘it's gonna be a change.'

McTell said, ‘I hate Dansk like a tumour in my chest, like a thing I gotta cut out at the root. It's got to where I can't hack the sound of his voice even, that little nasal thing he's got sometimes.'

‘Tell you what I hate,' Pasquale said. ‘This feeling of treachery.'

‘You'll get over it, Bruno. Down in Tijuana the Birthmark Kid's gonna fade to black.'

Pasquale said, ‘The thing is, I was inside the Protection Program, sitting in fucking Buffalo and bored outta my skull and just fucking
aching
for some action, and he rescues me from that meat-packing plant. He pulls me outta that situation and puts me back to my own kinda work. So I still feel I owe him, Eddie.'

‘Listen, I was twice as bored in Pasadena managing a laundromat and sniffing all those fucking cancerous chemicals they got in them places,' McTell said, ‘but I don't figure I owe Dansk a goddam thing. I'm sick of his shit attitude and the way he does things.'

McTell drove in silence for a time. ‘Let's see the gadget.'

Pasquale removed a black plastic box from his right side pocket. It was about 4 inches by 4, battery-operated. He flicked a switch and a panel lit.

‘Who made that box?' McTell asked.

‘Who what?'

‘There a manufacturer's name?'

Pasquale turned on the map light and studied the box. ‘Cisco Electronics Inc., San Luis Obispo, Cal, it says here.'

‘American. Call me a patriot.'

Pasquale peered at the red digital numbers on the box. ‘The only condition Loeb laid down is we got to do the thing in an isolated place.'

‘No problem,' McTell said. ‘It's a big empty state, Arizona.'

70

Amanda kicked off her shoes, changed her clothes from the business suit to jeans and a long-sleeved shirt of John's. She lit a cigarette and drew smoke deeply into her lungs. The nicotine didn't relax her. The palms of her hands were damp and some kind of nerve worked like a pulse in her throat. The unlit rooms of the cabin cramped her. The night was all tension and expectation, the silence that of a very delicate cease-fire. The dark had a heavy stillness and the air smelled like a pine coffin and the moon was behind cloud and sailing.

She crushed her cigarette in the fireplace and thought of Gannon strolling quietly round the cabin. She'd called Kelloway and badgered him into contacting the Flagstaff PD to see if members of the local force might provide more backup, and he'd been grudgingly obliging. A mile down the path, two cops armed with rifles and night-scopes watched and waited for unusual sounds and sights in the dark, and another, a deputy called Clarence Griffin, was posted close to the old bridge.

And now she wondered if she'd done enough or if her idea was flawed, or if she should have listened to Rhees and changed tack and gone to another destination far away. But she'd made this decision and she couldn't back out even if she'd wanted to, and she didn't, despite the menacing quiet of the forest and the arrhythmic nature of her pulses.

She lit another cigarette. She tilted her head back and realized she was listening as she'd never listened before in her life. If a pine needle drifted from a branch she'd hear it. If a grass snake stirred, she'd register the whispered slither of its movements. She was fine-tuned to whatever happened outside the cabin.

She sat on the floor, her back propped against the wall. She studied the dim shape of Rhees in an armchair on the other side of the room. He'd defiantly refused the wheelchair. He'd turned down the suggestion of going to a motel room and waiting alone. He'd been adamant and unusually stubborn, as if he felt a need to match her determination with his own. If he couldn't make her change her mind, then he'd stay with her and to hell with his pain.

He sat in shadow and said nothing, and she wondered if there was reproach in his expression, or fear, but she couldn't see his face, just the pale outline of his plastered arm and the sling, and the white stripes in his shirt.

She flicked her cigarette into the fireplace. ‘You OK?' she asked.

‘You're whispering,' he said.

‘Yeah, I guess I am. You think this is a bad move, don't you?'

‘When it comes to you, Amanda, it's like being caught up in a whirlwind, and I don't see much point in criticizing a force of nature.'

‘You didn't have to be here,' she said. ‘You had choices.'

‘The only feasible choice was to stay with you, at the eye of the storm.'

‘You haven't answered my question,' she said.

‘It's a bad move if it turns out wrong. It's a good move if it works.'

‘Fence-sitting,' she said.

Rhees said, ‘I'll tell you something I'm a touch more certain about: you don't
really
want Dansk captured, you want him gunned down by one of your posse out there. This notion you have about handing him over to Kelloway is one you'd
like
to believe in, but I get the sense you want blood. Tell me I'm wrong.'

Dansk's blood. Maybe there was a truth in Rhees's words she didn't want to acknowledge. Maybe a hardening had taken place inside her and she wanted him dead. But there were mysteries still, and they confounded her.

‘I want him any way I can get him.'

‘Dead or alive,' Rhees said.

‘I'd prefer alive,' she said. ‘The other way, he can't answer any questions, and I have a few I want answered.'

She lit another cigarette, masking the flame of the lighter in her hand.

‘He kills Willie and Mrs Vialli. Willie, OK, I can understand. He's a cop poking around asking questions. But Bernadette? Your average suburban widow, for God's sake … except for one big difference. She happens to have a son in the Protection Program and she's not happy because he's been silent too long. And when he does get in touch, it's in a form she finds iffy. Question: Where the hell is Benny?'

Rhees said, ‘For God's sake, leave it to Kelloway, Amanda.'

She walked the room quietly, window to door and back again. She stopped behind Rhees and laid her hands on his shoulders and a dark thought formed in her brain.

‘Benny's dead,' she said.

‘You can't
know
he's dead, Amanda.'

‘Benny's dead and Dansk's responsible, and the only goddam reason I can think he'd have for killing her was to keep her from discovering the fate of her son.'

‘I don't know where you're going with this,' Rhees said.

The patterns in her head kept spinning and shifting. She heard herself say, ‘Why wasn't Bascombe high on Kelloway's list of people to talk to? Lew was supposed to be digging up information for Willie, after all. So why did Kelloway call Justice first? And Loeb – what did the big Chief learn there? When I phoned him to beg for more bodies, he didn't mention his talk with Loeb. Why? Because it amounted to nothing? Because Loeb fobbed him off? Why?'

‘Leave it,' Rhees said.

Leave it. Leave it all to Kelloway. Hail to the Chief. Her thoughts were greyhounds on a slippery track, and she couldn't follow them and the hare they chased was out of sight.

Rhees said, ‘There's the more pressing matter of Dansk. If he's out there, he isn't going to walk blindly into a setup, Amanda. He'd
know
you've got cops staking the place out. He may be outnumbered for all we know, but maybe he hasn't been out-thought. Which scares me more than a little.'

Amanda heard the sound of Gannon's quiet footsteps on the porch. She inclined her face, bringing the surface of her cheek against John's. ‘I wish,' she said.

‘Wish what?'

‘Forget it. It doesn't matter –'

‘Wish I wasn't here? Wish I'd stayed in some nice safe motel room so you didn't have to take any responsibility for me?'

‘Yes. No. I'm not sure.'

He touched her hand. ‘If there has to be bait, you'd rather it was just you dangling.'

‘I want you to be safe, that's all. I don't want anybody to hurt you again.'

‘Eye of the storm, Amanda. It's no place to be alone.'