"How do I know Ruffi will be where you say he"ll be? How do I know you"ll ever come back?"
"You go through this world looking for guarantees, McGee, you"ll live small."
"Where is he?"
"Money in hand, and I tell you."
"Half the money in hand until I see him."
He thought it over for a slow ten count and then said, "Let"s give it a shot."
Eighteen I HAD been planning on turning the rental Buick in after breakfast. But Cappy said he would not ride in that crazy Rolls pickup of mine. He said Dean had told him about it. He said it was too conspicuous. He took a pair of very dark sungla.s.ses out of his purse and put them on and asked me if I had a hat he could use. He said he had lost his in the night, running down an alley. I found him an old white canvas fishing hat with a Sherlock Holmes shape. He pulled it well down on his head.
"b.u.t.ton up the shirt," I said, "and take off the jewelry."
"I never b... Oh, h.e.l.l yes. It"s hard to keep from being stupid."
After I got him into the car, I said I had forgotten to get the key to my box. I knew he would stay put. He got edgy whenever he was out in the open. I got the ten in hundreds. Divided the pack into two parts and inserted them into the two flat black packets that Velcro neatly just below my knees.
I drove to the branch bank near the marina where I have a safety-deposit box. I left him in the car in the lot and after the girl helped me unlock the little door, I carried my box into one of their little phone-booth rooms. I have it only because there are a few little items I would not care to have sunk or burned. Pictures of my mother and father and brother, all long gone. Birth certificate. Army discharge. Some yellowed clippings of my brief prowess as a tight end before they spoiled my knees. One theater ribbon, one Purple Heart, one Silver Star with citation for Sergeant McGee. A smiling photograph of Gretel Howard, another of Puss Killian, a few-a very few-letters, a copy of my will, which Meyer keeps telling me should not be in a safety-deposit box. I took the brown envelope in which the will had been, and put the hundred hundreds into it, a stack not an inch thick.
When I got back to the car he looked asleep with his hand over his eyes, but when I opened the door on my side, the blued muzzle of an automatic pistol flicked up and stared at me across his thigh. Then it was gone and he straightened up and said, "Sorry, pal. I thought I saw visitors. Got it?"
"Put away the gun."
"Sure."
"Here it is. Count it."
He held it well below the dash, below the level of his knees. He took two bills out at random, bent forward and examined them very carefully. He sighed, smiled, put them back in the envelope and slid the envelope into the zippered pocket on the back of the brown leather shoulder bag.
"Keep much in the box?"
"Millions," I said. "Untold millions." I"ve never kept money in the box. Money is expendable. It can always be replaced, one way or another.
"My problem was keeping too much in the box and not enough around loose. But who"d think things would get so jammed up I"m like on some kind of a list?"
"Where to?"
"What we"ve got to do is get a look at him. You, not me. So you know it"s him. We have to do it without making him jumpy, or he"ll run, G.o.d knows where. It isn"t going to be easy. He"s maybe up to twenty or thirty lines a day. That"s how he got into all this. That stuff makes you think you can do anything and get away with it. He"s using enough to make him very hard to figure, but not enough to make him easy to take. Years ago he used to be not too bad of a little kid. But they gave him the moon and the stars. The oldest kid, the favorite."
"Where to?"
"We"re going to have to work out something. I won"t tell you where, but I"ll tell you what. What you"ve got is an asphalt two-lane road running along the side of a ca.n.a.l. No trees growing close to the ca.n.a.l. Then you"ve got a wooden bridge that is kind of a hump that crosses the ca.n.a.l. The ca.n.a.l is maybe fifteen feet wide, I don"t know how deep. There"s a one-story frame house on the other side of the plank bridge, set back twenty or thirty feet. It"s got an aluminum carport on one side, big enough for one car. In back of the cottage and on either side is like jungle. Maybe there"s a way back through there. I never tried. At night there"s a big bright barn light fastened to the front of the house, lights up the whole place. It"s got electric and a telephone."
"How do you know so much about it?"
"I stayed there waiting for a man to come home. He was doing ten to life in Raiford and they let him out in a little over six. That was last year. I don"t want to get into all the whys and wherefores. Put it this way. It was the kind of scene you have to do it yourself and not put somebody else on it. So I was there with his wife and kid, waiting. It took him four days to get home. She was scared out of her wits he"d be too much for me. She hated the b.a.s.t.a.r.d. We kept the kid out of school. The kid had her orders-the minute he arrives, she shuts herself in her room. It went quick and easy and the woman and me, we dragged him way back into the saw gra.s.s and water and palmetto and slid him into a gator pond and put cement blocks on him to hold him down. Then we let the kid out and they hugged each other and they both cried, but they weren"t crying for old Daddy. They were crying for happy."
"Ruffi"s there now?"
"He lets her go shopping while he stays with the kid. She"s eleven years old. The woman hasn"t dared try anything. I left her my phone number last year. Nice woman. She phoned me from the supermarket ten miles down the road, asked for help. She said he was starting to mess with her kid. I said I"d try, but I didn"t tell her that right at that point in time I was trying to figure some way of getting out of my place without getting myself killed. It was staked out very tight. That was yesterday."
"How did she know his name?"
"She didn"t. I asked her what he looks like. She told me and said he came in a white Mercedes convertible and it is in her carport with tarps hiding it. It"s Ruffi."
"So why don"t you go take care of him and pick up his cash?"
"First, because I happen to know he got out without hardly any. It cost him what he was carrying to bribe his way out. Second, I don"t know if I could take him. It"s hard to tell what a nutcake will do next. And Ruffi is quick and tricky. And he"s the one sent me there last year, so he knew the layout."
"So why don"t you make a phone call and sell the information?"
"The people that want Ruffi don"t buy information from dead people. I"m on the list, so I"m dead. There"s some others on the list too, running like h.e.l.l, or holed up someplace."
"Why did you come to me?"
"Jesus H. Christ, McGee! I happened to find out you told Art Jornalero about Ruffi cutting throats down there in the Keys, and that"s what started the whole s.h.i.t storm. I heard you want him. How should I know? Maybe he killed friends of yours. People living around on boats, the kind of rent you have to pay at places like Pier 66 and Bahia Mar, you have to have some money. I knew where to find you from when they told me you should have an accident."
"What kind?"
"Dean was in charge. He was going to work something out."
"What"s the woman"s name?"
"Irina Casak. The kid is Angie. The RFD box is out by the road next to the bridge. It says Casak on it in red paint."
"What name does she know you by?"
"Good question. Maybe the way you took my guys out, it wasn"t all dumb luck. She knew me as Ben Smith."
"What kind of car does she have?"
"Last year it was a yellow Volkswagen bug, pretty beat up. Maybe she"s got the same one now. I don"t know. Do you know him by sight?"
"From a publicity still. I wouldn"t forget the eyelashes."
"So what we got now, McGeer I take you there and we have to figure out some way you get a look at him without stampeding him. You"re satisfied, we come back and you loan me the other ten and I give you the name you can sell him to. You"ll have to work out your own arrangements to keep from getting screwed on the payoff. Done right, you"ll end up smelling like roses."
So we went to take a look. It took an hour and forty minutes to get there, first south and then west. A lonely road on the edge of the Glades. Lumpy asphalt running string-straight through wetlands past wooded hammocks where the white birds sat on bare trees like Christmas doodads, thinking white bird thoughts.
He told me when to start slowing. We cruised past the bridge and the mailbox at a sedate thirty-five. I saw a yellow beetle pulled halfway into the carport on the left side of the frame house. The house was gray with green trim, and I had a glimpse of a broken rocking chair on the shallow porch, bed springs in the side yard, a swing made of a tire.
"Same car as before, parked in front of his," Cappy said.
Two miles down the road I found a sh.e.l.l road off to the right. It went about fifty feet before it went underwater. I pulled in and turned off the motor. I rolled my window down and heard ten billion bugs saying it was a nice warm day.
"We can"t risk going by more than one more time," I said. "I didn"t know there"s no neighbors at all. Who would have a reason for stopping there?"
"Mailman, meter reader. Look, maybe the easy thing to do is you take my word he"s in there, and sell him."
It was momentarily tempting. The shabby house in the swampy setting had an ominous look. And I didn"t want to sell Ruffi to the people who would take him out too quickly. I wanted to sell him to the law, for ten cents" worth of satisfaction. I wanted to untie the knot in my necktie. I wanted Ruffi to make some ineffectual attempts to maintain his ego and his vanity in jail.
We had pa.s.sed the supermarket and shopping plaza ten miles back the other side of a village. So I headed back there as soon as I found out Cappy could remember Irina Casak"s phone number.
The plaza was anch.o.r.ed by a big Kmart. As I sat brooding in the car, Cappy began to get impatient with me. "What"s going on?"
"Deep thought. She have television?"
"Little old black-and-white RCA."
When I told him the plan, he didn"t like it at all. The second time around. he thought better of it. The third time I told him, he made minor changes. I would turn around after I came across the bridge and park heading out, and I would leave the Buick keys in the ignition. He a.s.sured me before I phoned her that there was just the one telephone: "h.e.l.lo?" she said, her voice soft and hesitant.
"Irina, this is a friend of Ben Smith. I want to help you. Is the man there?"
"Yes."
"Can he hear you?"
"I don"t think so."
"You tell him you ordered a color TV from Kmart and it has just come in and they are coming out to deliver it in an hour."
"But I..."
"You ordered it two months ago. I"m bringing it out."
I heard a man"s voice in the background. "What"s going on."
She turned to him and said, "The Kmart is sending out my new color TV."
"Tell them you don"t want it."
"But I ordered it..."
He came on the line. "She changed her mind."
"It"s all paid for, Mr. Casak. I"m the manager of the television and electronics department here at Kmart and I have to come out that way on personal business and I thought I could kill two birds with one stone instead of having Mrs. Casak come in here to get it. It"s our best table model, guaranteed parts and labor for six months. A really beautiful reception even in fringe areas like you have out there."
"Well... okay. Bring it out. Leave it on the front porch."
I had counted on boredom to sway him. He was used to a wider world. I didn"t know what his plans were, but I imagined he wanted to stay right there until the trail was cold, and then go whizzing away in his little white car.
I took back the cash from Cappy to buy the set, $439 plus tax or $460.95 with tax. The clerk gave me a cash receipt form and a claim slip to present at Customer Services near the loading dock. Cappy grumbled about giving up the money. He said there was no way I was going to get into the house.
I found a place to pull off the road on the way back. The big cardboard carton was in the Buick trunk. An inch bigger and the trunk wouldn"t have closed. I opened the carton and got the set out, then took it out of the clear plastic that sheathed it. I put Cappy"s flat little.32 automatic in the plastic sack where it would be close to my right hand when I reached down into the carton and lifted the set out, with the screen facing away from me. Cappy didn"t like that part either. I had made certain there was a full clip and the safety was off. I had fired once into the woods to see how it felt. It had a nasty, flat, cracking sound. He said it was a spare, all he could pick up when he left in a hurry, and he didn"t like it either. He said it was Czech, and badly made.
I set off again with Cappy on the floor in back. I rumbled over the private plank bridge, turned around in the yard and parked with the front wheels inches from the bridge. I got out, whistling, and walked around to the trunk and opened it. Whistling is disarming. It can"t be done with a dry mouth. I had to gnaw at the inside of my cheek to get enough spit to whistle.
I lifted the carton out and carried it to the porch, put it down beside the front door and knocked. I knocked again and again. "Oh, Mrs. Casak! Mrs. Casak?" I called, and thumped the door.
"Go away!" yelled Ruffino Marino, Junior.
"She has to sign the delivery slip."
"Sign it yourself, dummy!"
"But I can"t do that. Mrs. Casak has to sign." The door opened just enough for her to slip out. "Just sign right here," I said cheerfully, putting the cash receipts on the carton and handing her a balipoint. I pocketed the receipt and dipped and lifted the set in its plastic sack out of the carton. "Will you get the manual and guarantee out of the carton, please, Mrs. Casak? Thank you. Now we have to make sure there"s nothing wrong with the set. It wasn"t checked at the store. It"s better to check them out at the customer"s home. Open up, please."
She was terrified. She was shaking. But she turned the k.n.o.b and pushed the door open. I carried the set in. I caught a glimpse of Ruffi in the doorway to the kitchen.
"You dumb b.i.t.c.h!" he yelled as he moved back out of sight. I had seen only that his hair was tousled and he had blue beard shadow on his jaws. Up until that instant I hadn"t been certain Cappy was pulling some kind of elaborate scam.
I ignored him. I had her move the black-and-white set off the low table it was on. I put the new set on the floor, reached down into the plastic bag and lifted the set out, with my fingertips holding the automatic pistol against the underside of the set. I put the set so far to the front of the low table I was able to ease the weapon out from under it and leave it on a couple of inches of table behind the color set.
Chatting merrily about what a good set it was, I plugged it in and I took the aerial leads off the black-and-white set and fastened them to the new one. When I turned it on I got a splendid picture on Channel 5, and I quickly jiggered one of the back side controls until I started the picture rolling slowly. And then, of course, I was very concerned.
"I can"t imagine why this is happening, Mrs. Casak. I"m very sorry about this. I don"t understand it."
She stood near me, breathing through her open mouth, almost panting with nervousness. Her breath was sour. She was a flat-faced pallid woman with a wide flat nose and so much dark discoloration around her eyes she made me think of a racc.o.o.n. The cotton dress, sweaty, revealed a ripe, big-breasted, serviceable body. Her face was twisted with alarm. Her fists were clenched.
So I couldn"t depend on her to play her part in the original scenario. I fixed the horizontal hold and got the good picture back. I motioned her to back away from me. I yelled, "Mr. Casak! Hey Mr. Casak. Will you please come see if these color values are okay? Mr. Casak!"
He had to know I had seen him in the kitchen doorway. And he had to know that if I had recognized him, I probably wouldn"t be hollering for him.
He came into the living room, and glanced at the screen. "It"s okay, dummy. Get the h.e.l.l out!"
I said, "I can make an adjustment in the back here to give it slightly less vivid color values."
As my right hand closed on the grip of the pistol, I sensed movement out the corner of my eye and knew before I turned that he was too close.
Nineteen.
WHEN I turned he was on the inside, clubbing my wrist away with a sharp and powerful swing of his left forearm. Before I could bring it back, he dropped away and kicked me on the point of the right elbow. Red-hot wires ran up into my shoulder and down to my fingertips, and the arm went slack, half numbed. The gun fell and skidded across the frayed gra.s.s rug. When he pounced toward it, bending to pick it up, I took one long stride and drop-kicked him in the stomach, lifting him clear of the floor.
Instead of quieting him, it galvanized him. He started bounding around like a big rubber ball, yelling sounds without words. I was in a small room with a crazy person. In hospital wards and precinct stations it takes six people to subdue one crazy. Six trained people. He came at me and drove me back against the wall, hit me a good one high on the left side of the head, and I went over, taking a tall cabinet with a gla.s.s door with me. When he spun to lunge for the gun, I dived forward and caught an ankle, hugged the foot to my chest and spun with it. He went down and turned with the foot, kicked me on top of the head with the free foot and tore loose. By then I had a glimpse of Irina holding the gun in both hands.
I yelled to her to throw it out the window. They were double-hung windows, the bottom sash up, screening across the bottom. As he reached for her she spun and flicked it through both layers of gla.s.s, out past the porch and into the dirt yard.