“I don’t know anything!” she shrieked, then began sobbing.
I was fresh out of sympathy. The ditsy broad stole my car, which was now sitting abandoned in her driveway. Whatever slim chance I once had of talking my way out of trouble had evaporated. No doubt the hit men were looking for me, too.
The rain started again. I turned on the wipers and tried to concentrate on driving but found that impossible. What should I do now? How was I going to stay one jump ahead of hit men who showed up when someone called the police? If the police were tipping them off, intentionally or inadvertently, no doubt the FBI was also cooperating. Hell, maybe the hit men were FBI.
I felt like a man driving to his own execution.
“Get this tape off me,” she said.
“You gonna bail at the first stoplight?”
“No.”
I thought a little clarification wouldn’t hurt. “Those people back there came to kill us, lady. I thought they’d show up before long looking for you, which is why I went to get you out of there.”
“A knight in shining armor,” she said acidly.
“You’ve been told. You want out of this car, that’s fine with me. I’ll drop you anywhere you say. Call the cops, the FBI, your boss, your boyfriend, your mama, whoever. Someone kills you, that’ll be your tough luck.”
I pulled over to the side of the road and ripped the tape off her arms. It must have hurt like hell, but she stifled the scream.
“You got a cell phone on you?” I asked when we were rolling again.
She swabbed her face with the tail of her blouse. When she finished she said, “Yes.”
“May I use it?”
She removed it from a pocket and passed it over. I threw it out the window.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The neighborhood where my lock shop partner, Willie the Wire, lived was quiet that soggy evening. I drove through once, looking for cars parked with people in them. Didn’t see anyone, so I decided to try the dead man’s cell phone.
I turned it on, waited for it to find the network, then dialed Willie’s number.
“Yeah,” Willie growled when he picked up his phone. He answered the telephone at the lock shop the same way — a nasty habit I had tried to argue him out of.
“It’s me.” He had told me a dozen times that relying on other people to recognize your voice was impolite, an ego trip, but I wasn’t going to drop it until he said hello in the conventional manner. Okay, so we were both a bit childish.
“Where are ya?”
“Driving by on your street.”
“Give me two minutes, then drive by again. I’ll jump in.”
“It’s a four-door sedan, white. Not the Benz.”
“Okay.”
He was on his stoop as I braked to a stop. He intended to get in the passenger seat. When he saw Kelly he got in the back. I had the car rolling before he could get the door closed.
“Kelly Erlanger, Willie Varner.”
She wasn’t talking to me at that point — still fuming about me tossing her telephone, I suppose — but she tossed off a “Hi” to Willie.
He grunted at her, then addressed me. “Carmellini, you idiot, what have you got your silly ass into this time?”
Keeping my eye on the rearview mirror, I told it straight, leaving nothing out. The stuff about the archivist was classified, of course, as was the existence of the CIA’s Greenbrier River safe house. Being a convicted felon, Willie Varner couldn’t have gotten a security clearance if his life depended on it. As I saw it that night, one more little felonious security breach wouldn’t blacken my character more than it already was. What the heck, the killers that morning probably didn’t have security clearances either.
When I finished my tale of woe, Willie gave a low whistle. “Jesus, Carmellini. Send you out of town for a day and all hell breaks loose. I never saw you so deep in shit before, man. Gonna need a backhoe to dig yourself out.”
“I should have let them shoot me?”
“Sounds like somebody’s gonna do you sooner or later.”
“You going to help or not?”
“Oh, sure. I’ll pop over to Langley tomorrow and ask to see the director. Get this all cleaned up.”
“Terrific.”
“Like, whaddaya want me to do?”
I held the cell phone up, offered it to him. “I took this off the guy who was driving the crashed car. There must be a bunch of telephone numbers on it. I want to know who they belong to. All of them.”
He didn’t reach for the phone. “I don’t want to go back to the joint,” he said. “I been there and I didn’t like it.”
I took my foot off the accelerator and half turned to look at him.
“Oh, all right!” He grabbed the phone. “Goddamn you, Carmellini.”
As we headed back for his house he muttered — loud enough for me to hear, naturally—“As if I didn’t have enough misery in my goddamn life… goddamn Russian assassins now.”
I could never do anything with Willie when he got pouty, so I didn’t try. Kelly Erlanger knew this mess wasn’t my fault, and she was in high dudgeon, too.
When I was braking to a stop in front of Willie’s house, he said, “They bust down my door and shoot my innocent black ass, Carmellini, I’ll torture you in hell until the end of time.”
He got out and slammed the door. As we drove away, Erlanger said, “What if he calls the police?”
“He won’t,” I assured her. “Willie Varner’s my best friend.”
She made a rude noise, which I ignored.
Erlanger was sulking, doubtlessly angry the killers didn’t wax her, when I remembered Dorsey O’Shea.
Well, why not, I asked myself.
Dorsey lived on that estate overlooking the Potomac, five hundred wooded acres complete with tennis court and swimming pool and a little three-story brick shack with fifteen or twenty rooms, five fireplaces, and a dozen commodes. Ol’ Dorsey owed me big for getting her cute little heinie out of the clutches of her porno boyfriend last spring. Surely she wouldn’t mind if Kelly Erlanger and I dropped in unannounced and hid from the law and the outlaws for a few days.
I pointed the car in Dorsey’s direction. We had been driving for fifteen or twenty minutes when Kelly asked, “Where are we going?”
“To visit a friend of mine.”
“She a plastic surgeon? You and I are going to need one if we hope to live out the year.”
“Naw. She’s a rich socialite. Never worked a day in her life, inherited a huge heaping pile when her parents had the grace to die young.”
“So how do you know her?”
“I was her boy toy for a while,” I said flippantly.
“Good Lord! She must be ancient if you were the best she could do.”
“She’s a real old prune,” I snarled. “And she’s got servants. A maid and a cook. Better keep your lip zipped and let me do the talking or we’re liable to wind up in drawers at the morgue.”
“This is your gig, hero. I’ll cling to you and look deeply into your eyes while you talk us into the house. But I want my own bedroom.”
I wasn’t about to tell Erlanger about robbing a safe deposit box for O’Shea. “You don’t know Dorsey,” I explained. “She’s a friend. She’ll be delighted to help. You’ll see.”
Dorsey O’Shea had a long winding drive, which was cool; you couldn’t see the house from the road.
A Porsche was parked in front of the place. I didn’t think it was Dorsey’s, because she always parked in the garage around back. I parked the heap beside the Porsche and hoisted the suitcase from the trunk. Kelly climbed the stairs and crossed the formal stoop and pushed the doorbell.
I joined her on the stoop with the suitcase.