As soon as the wrecker had passed, he slid out of the car and put a knee in Karlin’s back and then looked around for the pistol. It had skidded a dozen yards across the snow-packed road.
The wrecker had finally come to a stop, and a fortyish woman stuck her head out the window. She wore a knit cap with a baseball cap over the top of it.
“What the hell’s going on?”
“Right now, you mean? Not a thing. When you catch up with Frank Bauer, tell him I’ve got one of the guys from the car down here.”
The woman muttered something about nutcases and got the wrecker moving again.
Ben took his knee out of Karlin’s back and crouched beside him.
“Hello, Gary.”
Karlin jerked his head around and stared at him. “Do I know you?”
“My name’s Marciano.”
Karlin squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh hell — I do know you.”
Sue picked up the pistol. “Rats — he left the safety on. I could’ve got away from him anytime I wanted.”
Karlin was sitting up now with his back against the side of the car. “Do you think I wanted to hurt you? I just wanted to get out of here.”
Ben had lit a fresh cigarette. “Gary here was so scared that he won’t have to have another bowel movement for a month.”
Sue laughed in spite of herself — surprised at herself for being so cool when she’d hit the brakes and even more surprised when it had turned out that Ben had been in the car behind.
Ben said: “Is that the pistol that put the hole in the windshield?”
Karlin jerked his head around. “How do you know about that?”
“Hey, I’m a detective. I know about everything. I know that one of them was in the backseat with a gun and when you tried to open the door and dive out, he panicked and fired. Then the woman lost control of the car and put you all in the ditch.”
“The pistol landed right in my lap. I grabbed it just so they wouldn’t have it. Then I took off for the woods. And it wasn’t the woman driving, it was the man. The woman was in the backseat with the gun.”
Sue looked from one of them to the other. “I suppose all of this makes sense.”
“It makes a lot of sense,” Ben said. “Gary here’s an expert on miniature surveillance cameras — remote TV stuff. I’ve never used him, but a lot of investigators I hang out with have. Some businessman figures the night shift’s walking off with the store, so Gary sets up a hidden TV camera so he can catch them at it. That’s probably how you got into Aerosmith, isn’t it, Gary? Then while you were there you set up a camera for yourself.”
“How do you know about Aerosmith?”
“I keep telling you, I’m a detective. And anyway, I found your photograph beside the Toyota — the one you used to give your buyers an advance look at the goods. They must’ve liked what they saw all right. They liked it so much they decided to hijack you.”
Karlin shook his head. “I never should’ve agreed to meet them up here. But my mom lives in Saratoga, so I thought, what the hell.”
Ben patted him on the head. “Sure, Gary, you saved the cost of a hotel room. And now you’re going to save the cost of another because that’s a patrol car I see coming, and I’ll bet my socks it’s got Frank Bauer in it.”
Now it was Karlin’s turn to say rats.
“What did you whisper to Karlin just before Frank took him away?” Sue asked.
They’d driven back to her place so she could leave her car, and now she was climbing into the front seat of the Probe.
“I told him not to open his mouth till he sees a lawyer.”
“Ben—”
“No, that’s what I told him all right. That’ll give me a whole day’s jump on the police, and I intend to take full advantage of it. Let’s swing by the motor court before we go eat.”
“Eddie’s’ll be closing soon.”
“Not that soon. And I can always bribe him to stay open long enough to grill us a couple of steaks.”
He swung the car around on the slick road.
She wrapped her fingers around his arm. “What do you expect to find at the motor court? Tell me or I’ll hurt you.”
“A videocassette. But go ahead and hurt me anyway. I like it when you get mean.”
“And I’d like it if you’d level with me once in a while, Ben.”
“Figure it out. The man and the woman walked away from the car. They sure as hell didn’t trudge all the way back to Lake George or Saratoga. So where’s it likely they ended up?”
“And you want to talk to them? Tonight?”
“I very much want to talk to them, and I want to do it before they’ve had a chance to do much thinking.”
A few minutes later they were leaning against one side of the motel counter and Mary Chance, the woman who ran the place, was leaning against the other.
“They would’ve come in on foot about an hour ago,” Ben said.
“We need to tell them where the wrecker took their car,” Sue added.
“That’d be Mr. and Mrs. Yi. They’re over in unit five. You want me to call them?”
“No, that’s all right,” Ben said. “We’ll just stroll on over there. That’s where our car is anyway.”
“Now what?” Sue asked as they stepped out into the parking lot.
“Now we do some bluffing and walk home with the bacon.”
Light showed through the window of unit five, so at least they wouldn’t be waking anybody. Ben knocked on the door, then grinned at her as if they were playing some sort of Halloween trick.
A disheveled-looking Asian answered the door. If he had any spare clothes they were back at the other motel, the one they’d driven from in the Toyota.
He was short even for an Asian and looked incredibly young — in any bar you would’ve asked him for his ID. He stared at them with worried black eyes.
Ben flashed a leather folder at him — the one that held a card that identified him as a private investigator.
“My name’s Ben Marciano and this is my associate, Mrs. Corwin. I think we need to talk, Mr. Yi.”
The Asian backed up, mainly because Ben forced him to. Now Sue could see the woman. She stood beside the bed in bare feet with a ruined pair of stockings clutched in one hand. She was a lot taller then her husband and maybe a few years older.
“Are you police?” the man asked.
“Private type,” Ben informed him.
“What does that mean?”
Ben smiled at him. “Haven’t you seen any American movies, Mr. Yi?”
If he had, Sue thought, he would’ve watched private eyes doing all the things they never did in real life — pulling guns, jumping malefactors, breaking and entering — and maybe that was the idea Ben wanted to plant in his mind.
“I think you better get out,” the man said.
“Uh-uh. You took a shot at somebody tonight, and that’s serious business.”
At that point the woman spoke up. Her English was much better than her husband’s. She might have been a bit smarter, too — but not smart enough.
She said: “I didn’t mean to fire the pistol. We were afraid. We had money and that man might have done anything.”
Yi tried to shut her up with a violent wave of his hand, but she went right on.