Hit Parade

Page 25

“It’s not anybody,” Dot said, “which seems obvious, given that it didn’t ring.”
He touched the phone to her forearm, let her feel the vibration. She nodded, and he squinted at the screen again, then answered it. He listened for a moment, then broke into the middle of a Harrelson sentence.
“I gave you a phone,” he whispered. “Why aren’t you using it? You lost it?”
Dot put her face in her hands.
“Hang up,” Keller said. “I’ll call you back.” He broke the connection, got a dial tone, made a call. It rang a few times before Harrelson picked up.
“I didn’t know there was such a thing as an angry whisper,” Dot said. “You were whispering, and it sounded for all the world as if you were shouting.”
“He called me from his hotel,” he said. “Through the hotel switchboard, or whatever it is when you dial direct from your room.”
“Because he lost the phone you gave him?”
“Misplaced it, I guess you’d say. He knew it was somewhere in the room, but he couldn’t find it.”
“So you called him back, and when it rang he found it. It’s good he didn’t have it set to vibrate. I gather we’re back on the case.”
“More or less.”
“And you told him he has to come up with another twenty-five percent in front.”
“He’ll be back the end of the week,” he said, “and he’ll have the money then.”
“And the final payment? Is he going to be able to swing it?”
“He says it’s no problem. I think that means he’ll deal with it when the time comes.”
“In other words, stall us.”
He nodded. “He knows he’ll have plenty of cash when his partner’s dead and the situation with the company is settled. And I suppose he figures we can wait, because what else are we going to do?”
“Clients,” Dot said.
“I know.”
“If it weren’t for the clients, this would be the perfect business, wouldn’t it? Lucrative, challenging, and with enough variety built in that you’d never get bored.”
“There’s the moral aspect,” Keller said.
“Well, that’s true.”
“But you get over that. And when you do one that bothers you, well, there are little mental exercises for getting over it.”
“Making the image smaller in your mind and gradually fading it out.”
“That’s right. And the reaction, the bad feeling, it becomes familiar, you know? ‘Oh, right, I’ve felt like this before, I know it’ll go away.’ And it does.”
“So do the clients, sooner or later. The guy in Detroit, he went away before you could do the work.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“Usually,” she said, “we don’t even know who the client is, because the job comes through somebody else. And that’s ideal. And when we work directly, well, some clients are okay. But some of them are all wrong.”
“Like this one,” he said. “I’ll tell you, the target’s no bargain either.”
They looked at each other.
“Keller,” she said, “aren’t you the naughty boy.”
“Huh? I didn’t say anything.”
“It was the way you didn’t say it,” she said. “It spoke volumes.”
25
On balance, Keller would have liked to be going somewhere other than Detroit. Houston, St. Louis, Omaha, Cheyenne -almost anywhere, really. The flight was fine, he had to admit, but on his way out he kept looking around for a sign reading BOGART.
There was none, of course. He went to the Hertz desk and picked up the car he’d reserved as Eric Fischvogel. The Fischvogel ID was still good, but he’d used it on the previous flight to Detroit, and it was the name Harrelson knew for him, and he couldn’t decide if that was good or bad.
The Hertz girl had given him a map, and he settled himself behind the wheel while he studied it. Then he dug out the phone and called the only number on his speed dial. Harrelson picked up halfway through the first ring. He spoke, and Keller whispered back, and by the end of the conversation Harrelson was whispering, too.
Keller rang off, checked the map again, and started the engine.
The mall, in Farmington Hills, was pretty much a straight shot north from the airport. It was huge, of course, but one of the anchor stores was a Sears, and that’s where they’d arranged to meet. Harrelson would park his rented car nearby and walk to the store’s main entrance, and Keller would swing by in his own rental and pick him up.
There was no one loitering in the appointed spot when Keller got there, and that was fine. He’d figured to be early. He parked near the rear entrance, spent five minutes in the store, then moved the car to a spot with a good view of the front door.
Harrelson was a few minutes late, and Keller watched him for two or three additional minutes, watched as he paced, glanced at his watch, looked here and there, and paced some more. If he was trying to look anxious, he was doing a good job of it.
Keller hit his speed dial.
Harrelson, looking startled now, patted his pockets until he found the phone. He said, “I’m here. Where are you?”
“Walk to your car,” Keller whispered. “I’ll meet you there.”
“Oh. But I thought-”
Keller rang off. He got out of his car and watched while Harrelson gathered his resolve, such as it was, and headed for his car. Keller took a parallel aisle and had no trouble tracking the man.
“There you are,” Harrelson said.
“Here I am.”
“You know, I’d forgotten what your voice sounded like. All that whispering over the phone. Is that necessary, do you think?”
“Just a precaution. It’s sort of automatic.”
“For you, I guess. Me, I’m not cut out for this type of thing. I’ll be glad when it’s over.”
Keller couldn’t argue with that. He asked about the money.
“Oh, right,” Harrelson said. “You know, it’s a shame you had to come all this way just to pick up the money.”
“You don’t have it?”
“Oh, I’ve got it. But it would have saved you a trip to give it to you in New York.”
“Security,” Keller said. “Probably an unnecessary precaution, but the chance of our being seen together in the city was a risk they didn’t want me to run.”
“They,” Harrelson said.
“Right.”
“Well,” he said, and drew an envelope from his breast pocket. Keller took it, and there was a comforting thickness to it.
“I’m going home Friday,” Harrelson said. “I don’t suppose you’ll be staying that long.”
“I won’t be staying at all,” Keller told him. “I’m going straight back to the airport.”
“You fly in and you fly right back out again.”
That was Detroit for you. He nodded, and Harrelson said, “The thing is, I go back on Friday. Now we agreed I shouldn’t be in town when it happened, and-”
“You won’t be. It’ll be all taken care of before then.”
“Oh.”
“In fact,” Keller said, improvising, “I’ll make the call right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s all wrapped up before the sun goes down.”
“Wow.”
Keller punched in a few numbers at random, then watched as the phone slipped from his fingers and tumbled to the pavement. “Hell,” he said. “Just what I needed. Get that for me, will you?” And he reached for his hip pocket even as Harrelson bent obligingly to retrieve the phone.
26
“I guess the English would call it a spanner,” he said.
“And what would we call it, Keller?”
“A wrench.” He held his hand palm up, as if weighing the tool in his hand. “A monkey wrench, actually. Sears has this line, Craftsman tools. Quality at a price. Guaranteed for life, if you can believe that.”
“Whose life?”
“Well,” he said.
He’d drawn the heavy wrench from his hip pocket and swung it in an arc at Harrelson, who never saw it coming and consequently never knew what hit him. The first blow probably killed the man, but Keller made sure with two more, then scanned the area for bystanders before stooping to go through the dead man’s pockets. He dug out Harrelson’s calfskin wallet, took the cash and the credit cards, and tucked the near-empty wallet under the dead man’s extended right arm. He found a cell phone and pocketed it but kept searching until he turned up a second phone, this the one he’d given Harrelson. He loaded his pockets with everything he’d taken from Harrelson, used Harrelson’s pocket handkerchief to wipe anything he might have touched, and was in his car and on his way out of the lot before anyone walked down that aisle and spotted the body.
“There’s a bridge over the Detroit River,” he said, “but on the other side of it you’ve got Windsor, Ontario. It’s strange, because you actually drive south across the bridge, so you’re going south to get from the United States to Canada.”
“And then I’ll bet you drove north to get back.”
“I would have,” he said, “but I decided not to take the bridge in the first place, because who knows what kind of records they keep of people crossing into Canada, or back into the States. The Canadian border used to be like crossing a state line, but that’s different these days.”
“Like everything else. So you settled for a storm drain?”
“I liked the idea of the river. And it turned out there’s a bridge a little ways south of the city that runs to Grosse Ile, which is an island in the Detroit River between the U.S. and Canada.”
“What’s so gross about it?”
“It means big. And it’s got some size to it. I mean, it has its own airport.”
“For people who don’t like to drive over bridges?”
“The bridge is free,” he said. “No toll, nobody checking license plates. And not much traffic. I drove across it, turned around, and halfway back I stopped the car and threw three cell phones and a Craftsman wrench over the rail.”
“Why three cell phones? Oh, two from him and the one you used for calling him.”
He nodded. “It bothered me a little, tossing the wrench. Lifetime guarantee and all.”
“We’ve got a Sears right here in White Plains, Keller. You can always pick up a replacement.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it would come in handy when you’re playing with your stamps. What’s the matter, aren’t you going to correct me?”
“Correct you?”
“Tell me you don’t play with your stamps, you work with them.”
He shrugged.
“Something the matter, Keller? You in a mood?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“What’s wrong? The job’s done, the loose ends are tied off, and we got paid. Got paid time and a half, since Barry Blyden paid the whole amount, and Harrelson’s in no position to request a refund of his deposit.” She sipped her iced tea and grinned over the brim of the glass. “Like I always say, Keller, now you can buy yourself some stamps.”