ANDRENO: “Ralph Warren. I’m an ex-employee of a very old friend of yours, going back to the sixties. I need to talk to you.”
“What friend? Talk about what?” Warren had a high-pitched, reedy voice on the phone. “How’d you get this number?”
“We need to talk about all these dead people with lemons in their mouths. Your old friend figures that you might know something about it, and he’s very nervous. Therefore, he’s hiding out. The thing is, he took some pictures way back then, in that house, the one where the trouble started. He sent you copies. I had a little problem with your friend, and he canned my ass, so I lifted the pictures and here I am. All I want is my fee. Thirty thousand dollars. Then I go away.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, pal.”
“Okay. Well, then, don’t show up,” Andreno said. “I’m gonna be at Spiro’s Restaurant, which is three blocks west on University from your Checkerboard Apartments, at one o’clock. If you’re not there by ten after one, fuck it, I mail the pictures to the television people and go on back to Chicago. See you there, or not. I know what you look like… from the pictures. Oh-if you want to know where your pal is, I can tell you that, too. ’Bye.”
“Wait…”
But Andreno had hung up.
“He bit,” Shrake said from the backseat. “He’ll be there.”
JACKSON SET UP three hundred yards away with a camera lens as long as his arm. The rest of them stayed on the street, sitting in the backseats of plain-vanilla state cars, behind lightly smoked glass, each with a radio. For the first half hour, they saw nothing at all. Then the radio burped and Jenkins said, “Look at this guy. Red Corolla. He’s five miles an hour too slow and he’s checking everything.”
“Can’t see his face,” Shrake said. Virgil was at the end of the line, watched the Corolla as it passed, but was on the wrong side of the street to see the driver’s face. He watched as the car made an unsignaled right turn off University. They’d driven the neighborhood before taking their parking spots, and there wasn’t much down that street-a crappy old industrial street with no residential.
A minute later, the Corolla poked its nose back onto University and turned toward Virgil. “Corolla’s on the way back,” he said. “He’s probably our guy.”
The car rolled past: the driver was a big guy, wearing a steel-gray suit, wine-colored necktie, and sunglasses. He looked like one of Warren ’s security people: good physical condition and too big for the Corolla.
“Got another one,” Jenkins said. “Look at the Jeep.”
Red Jeep Cherokee, a few years old, slowed and turned into the parking lot. The Jeep made a slow tour, parked at the far end, sat for a moment, then slowly came back out. “I think they’re taking down the tag numbers on the cars,” Jenkins said. “It’d be interesting to know who’s running the numbers for them.”
“Let’s figure that out,” Virgil said. “Let’s get the numbers on the plates ourselves, see who ran them.”
The Jeep rolled out of the parking lot, turned back into traffic, drove a hundred yards up the street, then did a U-turn and parked two cars behind Shrake. “This isn’t good,” Shrake said.
“Maybe they’ll get out when Andreno shows or Warren shows,” Jenkins said.
“Hope so. Makes me nervous to have them right on my back.”
THEY ALL SAT, and waited, and got hot, and Andreno showed up at ten minutes to five, showing the Illinois tags, and turned into the parking lot. Shrake was watching the guys in the Jeep, through the windshield and rear window of the car behind him, and called, “They made him. They picked him out. As soon as they saw him get out of the car, the driver was on his cell phone.”
Andreno went inside. Three minutes later, he said, “I hope you guys can hear me.”
Virgil called him on his cell phone and said, “You’re loud and clear.”
WARREN SHOWED UP at one o’clock in a black Cadillac Escalade, got out of the passenger side, brushed the seat of his pants. Virgil said, “There he is, the guy in the black suit.”
Warren was wearing wraparound sunglasses and took them off and dropped them in his jacket pocket. One of his security people had been driving, and he checked out the parking lot, his eyes lingering on Andreno’s Crown Vic. Then he nodded at Warren and they disappeared into the restaurant.
They heard Andreno say, “Mr. Warren.”
Warren: “What’s your name?”
“Ricky.”
Warren must have sat down, Virgil thought. Warren said, “Call in,” apparently to his security guy, and then said to Andreno, “We’re checking in with my security people.”
A new voice said, “Yeah, we’re in. He’s here.”
Then Warren said, “What’s this about pictures?”
Andreno: “You want my story, or you just want the pictures, or you want the pictures first and the story later?”
“Let’s see the pictures.”
SHRAKE CALLED: “The Jeep guys are moving.”
The Jeep moved out into traffic, then turned into the restaurant parking lot and parked. A moment later, the Corolla rolled down the street, made a turn, and parked next to the Jeep.
ANDRENO WAS SAYING, “I’ve got color xeroxes. The actual pictures are… close. But I want to see some money.”
“The money’s close,” Warren said. “Let’s see the pictures.”
There was a moment of silence, then Warren said, “That’s not me. That’s just not me. Sorry about that, but it’s not me. That might be my head, but they Photoshopped it onto somebody else’s body.”
“Well, you know, it sorta looks like you, asshole,” Andreno said, putting a little New Jersey into his voice. “Quite a bit like you. And there’s at least one guy still alive who’ll tell the cops it is you. Anyway, if it ain’t you, fuck it, I’ll take my pictures and hit the road.”
“Where’s Knox? I want to talk to him,” Warren said.
“I don’t want to talk to him,” Andreno said. “We had a pretty serious disagreement.”
“About what?”
“About I was supposed to bodyguard him, but when I get up there, he’s in some fuckin’ cabin on this fuckin’ lake and he wants me out in the woods with the fuckin’ ticks and mosquitoes and these little fuckin’ flies… They were chewing my ass up, and I sez, I gotta get out of there, and he sez, we gotta have you up in the woods, Ricky, and we went around about it, and I went back out in the woods, but when they went out-they went out a couple times a day-I lifted the photographs and took off. All I want is my money.”
“Your deal is with him, not with me,” Warren said.
“Yeah, but you’re the guy I fuckin’ got,” Andreno said. “You can get the money back from him: believe me, you don’t want these things rolling around out there.”
“Five thousand,” Warren said. “That’s all they’re worth.”
“Bullshit. You killed those people in Vietnam and Carl said this other guy, this first guy you shot here, was feeling guilty and was going to the cops and that’s why you killed him, and then you had to kill everybody.”
“That’s wrong. Carl’s killing people, not me. Carl’s the one who killed those people in Vietnam.”
“Horseshit, I’ve got the pictures,” Andreno said.
“Five thousand…”
“Five thousand, kiss my ass, that won’t buy gas to Vegas.”
A third voice, the first time the other man had spoken: “Shouldna bought that piece-of-shit Crown Vic. What you get, a mile to the gallon?”
“FUCK HIM,” Jenkins said.
Shrake: “He’s right. Can’t shoot him for that.”
ANDRENO: “Twenty. I gotta have twenty.”
“Well, fuck you,” Warren said. “You’re lucky to get five, and I gotta get back to work. You want the five, or what?”
“You gotta come up from that or I’m walking,” Andreno said. “Five is the same as nothing.”