“Strangers, Jamie? I’m hurt.”
The voice froze him. He felt the blood draining from his legs. He wanted to fold his arms across his slug-stitched gut and fall down on the ground in the fetal position and just stay there.
Runyan was back on his own swing, grinning at Cardwell. Cardwell darted looks from him to the girl and back again. She had her face in her hands, trying to hide her tears.
“Why... why don’t you go play on the slide with the other kids, Patty?” he said in an uncertain voice, as if asking Runyan’s permission with the question.
Patty darted away without a backward glance.
“I had a chat with your V.A. caseworker, Jamie.” There was nothing in Runyan’s face at all. Not hatred, not pity. It was as if he were having a discussion with a picket fence. He idly drifted himself to and fro with little stabs of a toe in the dust. “I told him about saving your life in Vietnam, and he told me where to find you.” The voice got soft and terrible. “You do remember me saving your life in Vietnam, don’t you, Jamie?”
A great feeling of self-pity washed over Cardwell. “I wish you’d of left me to die! I never—”
“—never get any breaks,” said Runyan. “I know, Jamie. Like eight years ago, when you owed some Shylock money and came to me with this setup where you worked. Pleaded with me...” His voice was so low it was almost a whisper. “Seven years in Q, hoping it was just you and me in on it. But it wasn’t just you and me, was it? I had a phone call the night I got out of Q, Jamie.”
“A... phone call?”
Runyan’s eyes burned Cardwell with their coldness. “Which one suggested blowing me away and splitting it up between the rest of you?”
Cardwell wanted to lie. He was going to lie. But he couldn’t. Not to those eyes.
“They... didn’t know until... afterwards...” His heart was pounding so hard he thought it was going to fly to pieces. He burst out, “I had to, Runyan! There wasn’t enough, not with what I owed the Shylock, and the other guy’s cut, and what I needed to...” He swung his arm toward the children screaming their delight across the park. “She was on the way...”
Runyan stood up with a bitter laugh.
“I thought when I came out of Q that I wasn’t going to have to go into the shit again. Shows you how stupid a man can be, doesn’t it?” He looked off across the playground. “Eight years in the can.” He looked at Cardwell. “How old is she, Jamie? Eight? Nice kid. I’ll be in touch.”
Cardwell watched him walk away, tears of anger and frustration in his eyes. Yeah, he’d be in touch, and Cardwell would get shoved around again, would have his little Patty threatened again. He didn’t have any other options. In this lousy world he never had any options, never got any breaks. But he knew one thing: He needed a drink, bad. Right now.
Chapter 12
Cronin shifted the cheap plastic suitcase between his feet and leaned back further into the shadows, feeling equal terror and elation. Catty-corner across the intersection was the Chinese restaurant; in a few minutes Runyan would walk the half block from there to his hotel and would go up to his room.
And would be killed.
It had to be tonight, because Runyan had met the fence in that little park just as Cronin had suspected. He’d been too far away to hear anything, but after sending the little girl away they’d obviously argued price.
With a shotgun, you couldn’t miss, right? BING BANG BOOM, it was done. The guys in Vegas sometimes joked about it — making their bones, like that; now he was going to do it. What the hell, Runyan had killed guys in Vietnam, hero, decorated, all that shit. Now it was his turn. That’s just the way life was.
Moyers adjusted his rear-view mirror slightly when it picked up a heavy bearded guy angling across the street to the Westward Hotel, checking in with his cheap plastic suitcase. Transient neighborhood of meaningless guys like Runyan who’d screwed up their lives and would never get on track again.
Except that Runyan had slept with Louise Graham. A loser like Runyan didn’t deserve that sort of luck. Since his divorce a few years before, Moyers hadn’t had much luck with women he hadn’t paid for, and Runyan and Louise together had really burned him. So he was glad that now Runyan would be carrying her in his mind, wondering where she’d gone and why, wondering what he’d done wrong — and not able to do a damn thing about it except hurt.
Runyan was thinking of Louise and hurting. He wished he had the resources, knew the angles to find her again. But what if she hadn’t left because she was ashamed? What if she’d merely been called back to report to whoever had hired her in the first place? Stew about that one for a while, Runyan.
The bright-eyed black-haired old Chinese man brought his check and laid it on the table.
“Good soup?” he asked. Runyan had eaten fried chicken.
Runyan rubbed his stomach and grinned. “Very good soup.”
The old man giggled and went away with Runyan’s money.
Cronin came out of the room he had rented and tapped the sawed-off muzzle of his shotgun against the bare low-watt bulb of the nearest hallway ceiling fixture. The bulb shattered with a subdued POP which drifted down thin warm shards of pale glass.
He moved down the hall on silent stockinged feet, repeating with the other lights. Nobody came from any of the rooms at the sound of the bulbs breaking. Most of them were pensioners, what did they have to do anyway except go to bed early and stare at the ceiling in the dark?
The cross-hall was now very dim. Runyan would have just enough illumination to see the keyhole of his door. Which was the last thing he would ever see.
Runyan turned into the darkened cross-hall, checked at the slight crunch of glass under his shoe, then went on. For those few moments, still distracted by Louise, he rejoined the majority of mankind. Because most men, their survival no longer dependent on identifying another by his scent, the rate or timbre of his breathing, the precise click of tendons in knee or elbow, have lost the ability to perceive physical threats instinctively.
But Runyan was a born survivor. He had been around the corner from three murders in prison because his survival instinct had stopped him from turning those corners. Those same senses now strove to warn of danger, but Runyan was ignoring them.
Even when he stepped on the second litter of fragments, he didn’t connect it with himself. Since nobody knew the diamonds no longer existed, nobody could move on him, right? He was safe. By the dim light of the window, he bent to thrust his room key into the lock. Twenty feet down the hall, in darkness his eyes could not penetrate, a fingertip slid surreptitiously across a shotgun safety catch.
Runyan heard the tiny metallic click of his father’s shotgun safety before he heard the beat of the pheasant’s wings as it rose from the clump of red rye grass, and he knew, I’m between him and the light, and was already throwing himself backwards and sideways out of the closed fire-escape window while his conscious mind was still trying to fit the key into the lock. The frame and curtain six inches above his hurtling body splintered and shredded with the shotgun roar.
Runyan hit the slatted metal platform in a sideways tumble and kept rolling, right over the edge. Grabbing handholds recklessly, he dropped down the steel framework of the fire escape like a monkey, careless of torn palms, ripped clothes, or gashed skin, jinking first one way and then another to create a difficult target. Tricks that had become second nature from years of rock climbing and rappelling in the Sierra carried him down.