The Analyst (56 page)

“Don’t see that you give me much alternative. I could shoot you, but then, I wouldn’t find out what I need to know, and if, by some immense accident of police work, the cops ever managed to find me, why, I’d be facing significant charges-although you, of course, would find little satisfaction in that, being dead. On the other hand, well, as I told you, I’m not much of an animal lover. And Brutus there, well, to you he might be a paycheck, and maybe more, he might represent hours of time, and maybe even you might have some affection for him-but to me, why he’s just an angry, slobbering mutt eager to chew my throat out, and the world will be far better off without him. So, given the choice, I’m thinking that maybe it’s time for Brutus to head to that great old kennel in the sky.”

Ricky’s voice was filled with mocking amusement. He wanted the man to think he was as cruel as he sounded, which wasn’t hard.

“Just hold it for a second,” the kennel owner said.

“You see,” Ricky replied, “now you’ve got something to think about. Is withholding information worth the dog’s life? Your call, asshole. But make your mind up right away, because I’m losing my patience. I mean, ask yourself the question: Where are my loyalties? To the dog, who has been my companion and my meal ticket for so many years… or to some strangers who pay me for silence? Make a choice.”

“I don’t know who they are…,” the man started, causing Ricky to take aim at the dog. This time he held up both hands. “Okay… I’ll tell you what I know.”

“That would be wise. And Brutus will probably repay your generosity with devotion and by siring many litters of equally dumb and wondrously savage beasts.”

“I don’t know much…,” the kennel owner said.

“Bad start,” Ricky said. “Making an excuse before you’ve even said anything.”

He immediately fired a second shot in the direction of the furious beast. This shot cracked into the dog’s wooden hut in the rear of the pen. Brutus howled in insult and rage.

“Damn it! Stop! I’ll tell you.”

“Then begin, please. This session has gone on long enough.”

The man paused, considering. “It goes back a ways,” he began.

“I’m aware of that.”

“You’re right about the old couple that owned this place. I don’t know exactly how the scam was run, but they adopted those three kids on paper only. The kids were never here. I don’t know exactly who they fronted for, because I came in after the couple was killed. Both of them in a car accident. I’d tried to buy this place from them a year before they died, and after they smashed up that car, I got a call from a man who said he was the executor of their estate, asking me if I wanted the place and the business. The price, too, was unbelievable…”

“Low or high.”

“I’m here, ain’t I? Low. It was bargain basement, especially with all the property thrown in. A helluva good deal. We signed papers right quick.”

“Who did you deal with? Some lawyer?”

“Yeah. As soon as I said yes, a local guy took over. An idiot. Just does real estate closings and traffic offenses. And he was plenty miffed, too, because all he could say was I was getting a steal. But he kept his mouth shut, because I figure he was being overpaid, too.”

“Do you know who sold the property?”

“I saw the name only once. I think I recall the lawyer saying it was the old couple’s next of kin. A cousin. Pretty distant. I don’t remember the name, except that it was a doctor something or another.”

“A doctor?”

“That’s right. And I was told one thing, absolutely clear, too.”

“What was that?”

“If anyone ever, anytime that day or years ahead, ever came asking about the deal or the old couple or the three children that nobody ever saw, I was supposed to call a number.”

“Did they give you a name?”

“No, just a number in Manhattan. And then about six, seven years later, a man calls me one day, out of the blue, and tells me that the number has changed. Gives me another New York City number. Then, maybe a few years after that, same guy, calls up, gives me another number, only this time it’s in upstate New York. He asks me if anyone has ever come visiting. I tell him no. He says great. Reminds me of the arrangement, and says there will be a bonus if anyone ever does. But it never happens until the other day when this guy Lazarus shows up. Asks his questions, and I run him out. Then I call the number. Man picks up the phone. Old man, now, you can hear it in his voice. Real old. Says thank you for the information. Maybe two minutes later, I get another call. This time it’s some young woman. She says she’s sending me some cash, like a grand, and that if I can find Lazarus and keep him there, there’s another grand. I tell her he’s probably staying at one of maybe three or four motels. And that’s it, until you show up. And I still don’t know who the hell you are, mister.”

“Lazarus is my brother,” Ricky said quietly.

He hesitated, thinking, adding years to an equation that reverberated deep within him. Finally he asked, “The number you called, what is it?”

The man rattled off all ten numbers rapidly.

“Thank you,” Ricky said coldly. He didn’t need to write it down. It was a number he knew.

He gestured with the pistol for the man to roll over.

“Place your hands behind your back,” Ricky instructed.

“Oh, come on, man. I told you everything. Whatever this is all about, hell, I ain’t important.”

“That’s for certain.”

“So, just let me go.”

“I just need to restrict your activity for a few minutes. Like long enough to depart, before you can get up, find some bolt cutters, and let Brutus there loose. I’m thinking that perhaps he’d like to have a moment or two alone with me in the dark.”

This made the kennel owner grin. “He’s the only dog I ever known that carries a grudge. Okay. Do what you got to.”

Ricky secured the man’s hands with duct tape. Then he stood up.

“You’ll call them, won’t you?”

The man nodded. “If I said I wouldn’t you’d just get pissed because you’d know I was lying.”

Ricky smiled. “A bit of insight. Quite correct.”

He paused, considering precisely what he wanted the kennel owner to say. Rhymes leaped into his imagination. “All right, here’s what you need to tell them:

“That sounds like a poem,” the man said, as he lay on his stomach on the gravel, trying to turn his head to see Ricky.

“A kind of poem. Now we’re going to have a lesson. Repeat it for me.”

It took several efforts for the kennel owner to get it more or less straight.

“I don’t get it,” the man said, after mastering the poem. “What’s going on?”

“Do you play chess?” Ricky asked.

The man nodded. “Not too good, though.”

“Well,” Ricky said, “be thankful that you are just a pawn. And you don’t need to know any more than a pawn needs to know. Because what’s the object of chess?”

“Capture the queen and kill the king.”

Ricky smiled. “Close enough. Nice speaking to you and Brutus there. Can I give you one piece of advice?”

“What’s that?”

“Make the call. Recite the poem. Go out and try to collect all the dogs that have run away. That should take you some time. Then tomorrow wake up and forget any of this ever happened. Go back to the life you have for yourself, and don’t think about all this ever again.”

The kennel owner shifted about uncomfortably, making a scrabbling sound in the gravel driveway. “That might be hard.”

“Perhaps,” Ricky said. “But it might be wise to make the effort.”

He stood up, leaving the man on the ground. Some of the other dogs had stretched out, and they stirred when he moved. Replacing the weapon in the backpack, Ricky kept the flashlight in his hand, and started to jog down the driveway. When he disappeared from any of the light that flooded the front area of the kennel, he picked up his pace, turning onto the darkened roadway, and heading fast toward the cemetery where he’d parked his car. His feet made slapping sounds against the black pavement beneath him, and he switched off the flashlight, so that he ran in the pitch-dark country. It was a little like swimming in a storm-tossed sea, he thought, cutting through waves that tugged at him from every direction. Despite the night that swallowed him, he felt illuminated by a single, glowing piece of information. The telephone number. It was, to Ricky in that second, as if everything from the first letter delivered to his office, right through that instant, was suddenly part of the same great, sweeping current. And then, he realized, perhaps it went much further. Months and years into his past, where something was catching him up and sweeping him along, but he had been unaware of it. The knowledge should have exhausted him, he thought, but instead, he felt an odd energy, and an equally odd release. He thought the understanding that he’d been surrounded by lies, and suddenly had seen some truth, was like a fuel, pushing him ahead.

He had miles to travel that night, he thought. Highway miles and heart miles. Both leading into his past, and pointing the way to his future. He hurried, like a marathon racer who senses the finish line ahead, beyond his sight, but measured in the pain in his feet and legs, the exhaustion creeping into his every breath.

It was a little after midnight when Ricky reached the tollbooth on the western side of the Hudson River, just to the north of Kingston, New York. He had driven quickly, pushing right to the limit of where he thought he could, but not be pulled over by some irritated New York state trooper. It was, he imagined, a bit of a microcosm for much of his past life. He wanted to speed, but wasn’t quite willing to take the chance of truly flying. He thought the created persona of Frederick Lazarus would have pumped the rental car up to a hundred miles per hour, but he couldn’t bring himself to that. It was as if both men, Richard Lively, who hid, and Frederick Lazarus, who was willing to fight, were on this particular drive. He realized that since he’d constructed his own death, he’d balanced between the uncertainty of taking risks, and the security of hiding. But he knew that he was probably no longer as invisible as he once believed he was. He guessed that the man searching for him was close behind, that all the crumbs and threads of clues and indications had been found, from New Hampshire straight back down the highway to New York City, and then over to New Jersey.

But he knew he was close, too.

It was the most deadly of races. A ghost pursuing a dead man. A dead man hunting a ghost.

He paid his toll, the only car crossing the bridge at that late hour. The tollbooth collector was in the midst of a copy of
Playboy
magazine, staring not reading, and barely looked in his direction. The bridge itself is a curiosity of architecture, rising hundreds of feet above the ribbon of black water that is the Hudson, illuminated by a string of green-yellow sodium vapor lights, descending to meet the earth on the Rhinebeck side in a rural, darkened bit of farmland, so that from the distance it appears like a glowing necklace suspended above an ebony throat, swallowed up by the pitch black of the shore. It was an unsettling ride, Ricky thought, as he steered toward the road that seemed to disappear into a pit. His headlights carved out weak cones of wan light against the surrounding night.

He found a place to pull over and removed one of his two remaining cell phones. He then dialed the front desk number at the last hotel where Frederick Lazarus was scheduled to be staying. It was a desultory, shabby, and cheap place, the sort of hotel that is only a single, fragile step above those that cater to prostitutes and their dates on an hourly basis. He guessed that the night deskman would have little to do, assuming no one had been shot or beaten that night on the premises, which, Ricky knew was a large assumption.

“Excelsior Hotel, how can I help you?”

“My name is Frederick Lazarus,” Ricky said. “I had a reservation for tonight. But I won’t make it there until tomorrow.”

“No problem,” the man said, laughing a little at the thought of a reservation. “There will be as much room then as there is now. We’re not exactly overbooked this tourist season.”

“Can you check to see if anyone left any messages for me?”

“Hang on…,” the man said. Ricky could hear the telephone being placed on the counter. The man came on in a moment or two. “Christ yes,” he said. “You must be a popular guy. There’s at least three or four…”

“Read them to me,” Ricky said. “And I’ll take care of you when I get there.”

The man read off the messages. They were the bunch that Ricky had left for himself, but no others. This made him pause.

“Has anyone been there, looking for me? I was supposed to have a meeting…”

The night clerk hesitated again, and in that hesitation Ricky learned what he needed. Before the clerk could lie by saying no, Ricky told him, “She’s gorgeous, isn’t she? The type that gets what they want, when they want it, no questions asked, right? A lot more high-class than you usually get coming through the front door there, right?”

The clerk coughed.

“Is she there now?” Ricky demanded.

After a second or two, the clerk whispered, “No. She left. A little less than an hour ago, right after she got a call on her cell phone. Took off real quick. And so did the guy she was with. They’ve been in and out of here all evening asking for you.”

“The guy she’s with?” Ricky asked. “Kinda round and pasty, looks a little bit like the kid you used to beat up on in junior high school?”

“You got it,” the clerk said. He laughed. “That’s the guy. Perfect description.”