Down in front of the subdivision was a beach, where girls and women sunned, and swimmers, kids mostly, romped close to shore. Out on the lake, sailboats and motorboats of various sizes and shapes skimmed across the water. The cool breeze was soothing, and Nolan could have dropped down into a soft bed of grass and fallen asleep, had this been another time.
But it wasn’t.
He moved toward the boathouse, which was two stories of yellow stucco trimmed with brown wood, Swiss Chalet-style. Wooden stairs on either side met in a balcony that came across the front of the building and faced the lake, but not around the back. Trees and bushes and out-of-hand weeds crowded the boathouse; it had been some good time since a gardener tended these grounds.
He approached slowly, keeping down, pushing through the heavy bushes around the house, keeping under their cover. On his haunches, he moved along the side of the stucco wall, then eased carefully out onto the gravelled drive, the balcony overhead shading him as he edged along the garage door. The brown wood of the garage door didn’t quite match the wood trim and stairs and balcony, being more modem than the rest of this ’20s vintage building; the door had windows strung across it that allowed Nolan to peek in at the blue Oldsmobile inside. One half of the garage had been meant for boat storage, but no boat was there now, just a dirty, long-discarded tarp that lay slumped across the spot where a boat had once rested. The garage was empty of people and, except for the Olds and the tarp, any sign of human life. Not a rake or a saw or a car-jack or a pile of old newspapers, nothing. People didn’t live here anymore.
To the left of the bar area was a stairway. Nolan crossed the room like an Indian and started up the stairs, at the top of which was the light of an open doorway. As he climbed he noticed the tightness of his facial muscles, how tense his neck was, and consciously loosened himself, fanning his.38 out in front of him in a fluid, almost graceful motion. Nolan stepped into the hallway on the balls of his feet. The hall was narrow, three doors on each side, all of them shut tight. One by one he stood before the doors and listened, not opening any of them, only listening, pressing an ear tenderly against the heavy wood, searching for a sound. A dripping faucet behind one door told him he’d found the can, but he heard nothing else until he’d worked his way down both sides of the hall. This final door was to one of the rooms that faced the hill; the rooms on this side were more likely for holding a prisoner than those with views of the lake and a balcony running by. He listened and then he heard a voice, a man’s voice.
He stood to the left of the door, back to the wall, and reached across and turned the knob and nudged the door barely open. Then with a quick kick he knocked it open all the way and flattened back against the wall and heard the snick of a silenced gun and watched the slug splinter into the door opposite. Still flat to the wall, he peered around between fully open door and doorjamb, hopefully to fire through the crack into the room at whoever shot at him, and saw Jon standing there, holding an automatic in one trembling hand.
“It’s Nolan,” Nolan said softly, and stepped into the doorway.
“Nolan!”
“Quiet,” he said, walking into the room.
“I could’ve killed you.”
“Well, you didn’t.”
The room had pink wallpaper, a big bed with open springs and sheet-covered furniture. On the bed was a young guy in his early twenties, wearing a blue tee-shirt and white jeans and tied to the bed. One of his feet was bare; this was explained by the sock stuffed in his mouth, as a make-do gag.
“I bet that tastes sweet,” Nolan said. “Charlie’s kid?”
“Charlie’s kid. His name is Walt. God, am I glad to see you, Nolan.”
“Where’d you get the gun and the ropes?”
“From him. Those are the ropes I was tied up with for longer than I’d care to talk about.”
“How long you been in control here?”
“Five minutes maybe. Had a chance earlier, but I blew it. Anyway, he came around a while ago to see if I had to take a piss or anything and I kicked him in the nuts.”
“You’re learning.”
“He’s really a pretty decent guy, for a kidnapper. He was going to help me.”
“Then why’d you feel it necessary to kick his balls in?”
“He kept talking about helping me, but he never got around to doing it.”
“I see. Where’s Charlie?”
“Up on that hill there, I guess. In that house up there. You can see the place from the window.” He walked over to the window and Nolan came along. Jon pointed out and said, “See?”
This side of the hill was just as steep, but there was no row of pines blocking the view. The house was two stories of yellow stucco, like the boathouse, but was much bigger and of that pseudo-Spanish architecture so common in the twenties. With its turrets and archways, it was a genuine relic, the castle of latter-day robber barons, built during the blood-and-booze era by the father of Charlie’s late wife. Someday people would pay fifty cents to hear a tour guide tell about it. Maybe today would provide a sock finish for the guide’s line of patter.
“Somewhere down in those bushes,” Jon said, “is an underground elevator or something. Or maybe a hidden stairway. Over to the right of those cobblestone steps, see? I watched Walt last time he came back from the house and he came out of those bushes.”
Nolan scratched his chin with the hand the.38 was in. “Kind of figured there was some other, easy way up there, besides steps. There’s steps in front and back both, but with Charlie wounded — he is wounded, isn’t he?”
“Yeah,” Jon nodded, “his thigh. I saw him back in Ainsworth’s office, his thigh was all bandaged. That’s the last time I saw Charlie, was back there in Iowa City. Christ, that reminds me, how’s Karen? How the hell is she? Did you see her?”
“Yes. She’s fine. How about you? You all right?”
“I am now that you’re here. How’d you find me, anyway?”
“We can shoot the bull later, kid. Right now we got things to do.”
“Listen, why don’t we just... no. Forget it.”
“Something on your mind?”
“No, nothing, forget it.”
“You were going to say, why don’t we just take off while we got our asses in one piece?”
“Well, yes. Being alive sounds pretty damn good to me at the moment.”
“Do what you want. I’m staying.”
“Yeah, well, me too, of course. And I understand how you feel about this guy Charlie, it’s a real thing between you two, been going on a lot of years and...”
“Fuck that. The money’s what I care about. That son of a bitch has three quarters of a million dollars, our three quarters of a million dollars, Jon. And all that money sounds pretty damn good to me. That’s what I call being alive.”
“I’d almost forgotten about the money — how could I forget that much money. Seems so long since yesterday. Yesterday Planner was alive, Nolan, do you realize that?” Jon’s hand whitened around the nine-millimeter automatic. “I’m glad we’re going to do something about... about what they did to Planner.”
“Look. One thing we don’t need to be is emotional. We got no time for revenge. That’s for the crazy assholes, like Charlie. I want that bastard breathing, for the time being anyway. I got to shake our money out of him. God knows what he’s done with it.”
“The money,” Jon said, nodding, loosening up. “That’s what’s important.”
Nolan pointed at Walter, whose close-set eyes were big from listening intently to the conversation. “What about him? Have you gotten anything out of him?”
“We hadn’t got very far in our conversation when you got here. I was asking him yes and no questions so he could shake his head and answer, and he claimed he wouldn’t scream or anything if I ungagged him, but I wasn’t convinced yet.”