“Oh, yes, sir,” the girl said, determinedly sunny. “She comes every night. It seems to cheer her up. Ms. Cahill will be down in a moment. Oh, I see her coming.”
They all did, emerging from the tarp-covered ramp, a tall slim woman, attractive but more substantial than the girls in the straw hats, she in low-heeled pumps, dark blue skirt and jacket, white ruffled blouse. When she approached their group, her smile looked metallic, something stamped out of sheet tin. The hand she extended, with its long coral-colored nails, seemed made of plastic, not flesh. “Mister Assemblyman,” she said, as though delighted to meet him. “I’m Susan Cahill, I talked with your Dianne Weatherwax on Wednesday.”
“Yes, she mentioned you,” Sternberg said, grumpily, accepting her hand as though it was only the likelihood that she was a voter that made him do it. “This is my escort, Mr. Helsing and Mr. Renfield.” Parker had not given Kim Toe Kwai any specific names to use on the IDs he’d made up, and he’d apparently been watching a Dracula movie recently.
Susan Cahill turned to offer a lesser smile to these lesser beings, and Parker said, “My identification,” showing her Kim’s first-rate handiwork in its own leather ID case, explaining, “Mr. Renfield and I are both carrying firearms. One handgun each. I’m required to tell you that before we embark, and to explain, the law forbids us to give up the weapons when we’re on duty.”
She blanched a bit, but said, “Of course, I understand completely. If I may?”
He held the ID case open so she could read. She was brisk about it, then nodded and said, “Thank you for informing me.”
“We’ll have to inform the captain, too.”
“I’ll take care of that,” she assured him.
Wycza had his own ID case out. “This is mine,” he said, but as he extended it she said, “No, I’m sure everything’s fine. Mister Assemblyman, would you and your escort follow me?”
“Before we go,” Sternberg said, “I want to make one thing perfectly clear. This is not an official visit. I am on a factfinding mission only. I shall not be gambling, and I shall not want any special treatment, merely a conducted tour of the ship.”
“And that’s what you’ll get, Mister Kotkind,” Susan Cahill assured him. “Gentlemen?”
They cut the line of boarding passengers, but no one minded. People could tell they were important.
THREE
1
Ray Becker waited an hour after they’d left, the man called Parker and the big one, both in dark suits and ties, the girl in her wheelchair that she didn’t need, driven in the Windstar van by the guy in the chauffeur suit, all of them off and away on a Friday night, a big night in the world of casinos, all dressed up to put on a show. Tonight’s the night. It’s over at last.
Five after six they’d driven away in the two vehicles, the Subaru and the van. The big man could be seen complaining, as they went by, about being crammed into the little Subaru; they’d left his big Lexus behind. So they’ll be coming back, without the Subaru. Over the water?
Becker’s observation post was the parking lot of an Agway, a co-op farm and garden place, a hundred yards up the road from the turnoff to the Tooler cabins. He’d rented a red pickup truck two weeks ago, over in Kingston, the other side of the river, and during his observation hours he wore a yellow Caterpillar hat low over his eyes and sat lazily hunched in the passenger seat of the pickup, as though he was just the hired man and the boss was inside the Agway buying feed or tools or fencing or whatever. If he squinted a little, he could just barely see that dirt road turnoff down there.
So he could always see them come out. Sometimes they’d turn south, away from him, and then he’d scoot over behind the wheel, start the engine, and race after them. Other times, they’d head north, and he’d have leisure to eyeball them as they drove by, before setting off in pursuit.
But not today. No pursuit today. Today he knew where they were going, and what they planned to do, and where they planned to come afterward with the money. And Ray Becker would be there when they arrived.
Just in case, just to make absolutely sure none of them was coming back for any reason, he waited a full hour in the pickup in the Agway parking lot before at last he roused himself and slid over behind the wheel of the pickup and started the engine. Five after seven. The Agway closed on Fridays at seven, to catch the weekend gardeners and do-it-yourselfers, so the chain-link gate was half-shut; Becker steered around it, waved a happy goodbye to the kid in his Agway shirt and cap standing there waiting to shut the gate the rest of the way after the last customer finally drove on out, and the kid nodded back with employee dignity. Then Becker turned left and drove on down to the dirt road, and in.
This was the first he’d driven this road, though he’d walked down it one night last week to spy on them, being damn careful not to make any noise, attract their attention. He’d found four cottages at the end of the road that night, but only one lit. He’d looked in windows long enough to get an idea of what their life was like in there, and he’d been surprised to see that the girl apparently slept alone. Two of the three men used the other two bedrooms, and the fake chauffeur bedded down on the sofa in the living room. There were guns visible in there, and maps, everything to confirm him in what he already knew: Howell had been right.
Now, just after seven in the evening on a Friday in late May, the sky still bright, late afternoon sunlight making long sharp black shadows that pointed at him through the woods, Ray Becker was back. As he drove along the dirt road toward the cabins, he visualized Marshall Howell as he’d been, the dying man in the wrecked Cadillac, and he grimaced yet again, feeling once more that quick twinge of embarrassment and shame.
He’d almost screwed it up but good that time. He’d known the man in the Cadillac was hurt and vulnerable, but he hadn’t had any idea at all that he was in such bad shape, that he was dying.
Well, no, not dying, probably not dying. But killable, as it turned out, very easily killable.
Becker was in such a hurry at that instant. He was the only lawman on the scene, but that couldn’t last. Others had heard the same radio calls, would be coming to the same location, while the Feds continued in pursuit of the other vehicle. Ray Becker, understanding at once what it meant, had raced here at top speed when the radio call came in, because there was supposed to be a hundred forty thousand dollars in this car, and a hundred forty thousand dollars could save Ray Becker’s ass. A hundred forty thousand dollars and his patrol car and he could be away and safe forever before they even noticed he was gone.
He’d already been thinking about it when the radio started squawking, thinking how the investigation was getting closer, how the detectives knewthere must have been a local cop involved in that hijacking two months back, they just didn’t know which one. But Ray Becker’s reputation wasn’t very good anyway, so they were focusing on him, and sooner or later they’d nail him, which was why he needed to get awayfrom here, with a lot of money for a cushion. A hundred forty thousand dollars, say.
He almost broke his neck racing down that steep tumbled hillside through the freshly broken branches and crushed shrubs and scarred boulders to the crumpled wreck of the Cadillac, and when he got there the hundred forty thousand was gone. One perp left, crushed inside the car, bleeding and sweating but conscious. Capable of speech.
“We don’t have much time,” Becker told the son of a bitch, with his hand closing on the man’s throat. “Where’s the money?”
“Don’t know.”
Lying, he had to be lying, he had to know where his partners were headed. Becker leaned on him, he did things to make the pain increase, and Howell moaned, and tears leaked from his eyes, but his story stayed the same. He didn’t know where his partners were going, he didn’t know where the money was.