They crossed the bridge. The heavy traffic was coming across the bridge into Manhattan, rush-hour commuters coming into the city. He drove through Astoria, and she checked the route in the pocket atlas and told him which turns to take. They made only one wrong turn; it took them three blocks out of their way, but they found their mistake and got back where they belonged. He found Krause’s block and then Krause’s building and drove around looking for a parking place.
The only spot was next to a fire hydrant. He drove around the block twice, and by the second time around someone had come out and moved a car. It was a tight fit, but he managed to squeeze the Ford into the space.
He killed the motor, got out of the car. He walked around to the curb side while she moved over behind the wheel. He got in and sat beside her. Her purse, with the.38 in it, was on the seat between them. From where he sat he had a good view of the entrance to Krause’s apartment building. It was about half a block away, on their side of the street.
And Krause was home. Dave could see the gunmetal Pontiac just across the street from Krause’s building. Krause was inside, and he would not stay there forever.
“This time,” he said quietly, “we do it right.”
She nodded. Her hands gripped the steering wheel securely and her eyes were fixed straight ahead. He offered her a cigarette but she didn’t want one.
His window was up. He rolled it all the way down.
He said, “The easy way, the simple way. Listen, back up as far as you can, and swing the wheel so that we can get out of here in a hurry. We don’t want to be stuck in this spot.”
She did as he told her, backing the car all the way against the car behind them and turning the wheel so that they would be able to pull out quickly when the time came. He smoked his cigarette and flicked the ashes out of the open window.
Waiting, he thought, was always the hardest part. Once things began to happen, a good percentage of your actions were automatic. You didn’t have to sit and think, and you had no time to worry, no chance to second-guess yourself. But waiting required a special sort of personal discipline. You had to accept that stretch of time as something to be endured, a wasted period during which you turned yourself off and let the time pass by itself.
His mind went over details. He tested the plan from every angle, and each time it held up. It was simple and direct. There were no little tangles to it, no sharp corners that could catch and snag. It held.
And they waited.
A few people left Krause’s building. Two or three entered it. One time he saw a man framed in the doorway who looked very much like Krause, and he had to look a second time before he realized it was someone else. He felt annoyingly conspicuous, sitting like this in a parked car, but he told himself that it was safe enough. No one would pay any attention to them. People sat in parked cars. There was no law against it. And the people who walked past them seemed in too much of a hurry to waste valuable time noticing them.
It was cool out, and once he started to roll up the window. She asked what he was doing, and he caught himself and rolled the window down again. He reached over and opened her purse. The gun was there, waiting.
At twenty-five minutes after ten, Dago Krause came out of the building.
They both saw him at the same moment. Krause stepped out of the doorway, a cigarette in one hand, and he took a drag on the cigarette and flipped it toward the curb. He was wearing a tan trench coat, unbelted, the cloth belt flapping. His shoes were highly polished. He moved toward the curb, and Jill turned the key in the ignition and pulled out of the parking space. The Ford rolled forward. Dave took the gun from her purse and held it just below the window on his side.
There were two cars parked in front of Krause’s building with a four-foot space between them. Krause stood at the curb’s edge between the two cars. He moved out to cross, saw the Ford, and stepped back to let it pass him. The Ford moved even with Krause.
Dave braced the barrel of the gun on the window frame. Jill hit the brake, not too hard, and the car slowed.
Krause looked at them. There was an instant of recognition — of the gun, of Dave. Then Dave emptied the gun at him.
One bullet missed and broke glass in the door of the building. The other four bullets were on target. Three hit Krause in the body, one in the stomach and two in the center of the chest. The final bullet caught him as he was falling and took half his head off. The combined force of the shots lifted Dago Krause off his feet and tossed him back on the curb. He never had time to move, never uttered a sound.
Jill’s foot left the brake pedal and put the accelerator on the floor. The Ford jumped forward as though startled and raced straight ahead for two blocks. There was a red light at the second intersection. She slowed the car briefly, then took a hard left through the light and sped down that street for two more blocks. She turned again, right this time, and slowed down to normal speed. The.38 was back in her purse, the window rolled up. The car had a heavy gunpowder smell to it, and he opened the vent slightly to let it air out.
On a residential street about a mile away she stopped the car and he got out and switched the plates. The whole operation — removal of the Jersey plates and substitution of his own — took less than five minutes. He got back in the car and she headed for the Triborough Bridge again while he wiped his fingerprints from the stolen license plates. When they passed a vacant lot, she slowed the car and he unrolled the window and threw the plates out into the middle of the field.
They crossed the bridge. She drove the width of Manhattan on 125th Street, then stopped at the entrance to the Henry Hudson Parkway and let him take the wheel. He headed north on the Henry Hudson, picked up the Saw Mill River Parkway and followed the throughway signs. There were three bridges to cross and a lot of tolls to pay, and the traffic was moderately heavy on the Saw Mill River Parkway, but they were on the throughway by noon.
Chapter 18
The sky was turning dark. They stood together at the crest of the hill and looked out over the rolling countryside. There was very little traffic on the highway. The sun had set minutes ago. There was a red glow to the west. Behind them, the motel’s neon sign winked on and off, on and off.
The motel was on Route 28, a two-lane state highway that curved through the Catskills. They had left the throughway at the Saugerties exit and had driven this far before he decided to call it a day. They spent the afternoon by the side of the motel pool, ate dinner at a roadhouse a few miles down the road to the east
She said, “I can’t believe it, you know.”
“That it’s over?”
“That it’s over. Or that it happened at all, the crime or the punishment. Neither one seems real now. Just eight days, I can’t believe any of it.”
He slipped an arm around her waist. She leaned against him and he smelled the fragrance of her hair. “After a year,” she said, “we won’t be able to believe it at all, any of it. You’ll be a very very promising young attorney and I’ll be a charming young married in the social swim and it will seem so completely unreal we’ll think we dreamed it.”