“Crap,” I said softly. “We have company.”
“Who?” said Charlie, his head swiveling. “What?”
“Turn and walk slowly toward the boardwalk like nothing is wrong.”
“What?”
“Just do it, Charlie. Now.”
Charlie’s swiveling head stopped in the direction of the two joggers. He coolly let out a yelp and then, suave as could be, ran the hell away, toward the little path between the fences that led to the boardwalk. He was sprinting as fast as he could, which was not fast at all, arms and legs akimbo, like a cartoon character running in midair and going nowhere.
I caught up to Charlie Kalakos in a flash, grabbed hold of his arm, and started lugging him toward the stairway. The hoods were shouting as they ran for us, the seagulls were squawking, Charlie was whining.
“Stop pulling me. You’re going to tear off my arm.”
“How’d you get here?”
“Car.”
“Where is it?”
“You’re hurting my arm.”
“Where’s your car?”
“Down Seventh.”
When we reached the stairs, I pushed him ahead of me. I glanced back quickly. The hoods were about thirty yards away, sprinting toward us, sand flying behind them. I leaped up the wooden steps, two at a time, pulled Charlie up the last. At the boardwalk we charged into the crowd and then stopped, looked around.
“Here,” I said, grabbing Charlie and pulling him now to the right, away from Seventh. “This way.”
“My car’s that way,” he said.
“I know, but the crowd will be thickest in here.”
I was pulling him toward the Turkish arches of a small amusement park, with its carousel and roller coaster and great Ferris wheel rising over the boards. On the way I saw an overweight kid with a huge tub of caramel popcorn.
“You might not realize it,” I told the kid as I grabbed the tub smack out of his chubby hands and threw it as hard as I could, high in the air, over the crowd, toward the stairs, “but I’m doing you and your arteries a favor.”
The kid screamed like a siren, the popcorn spun out in a cloud.
An onslaught of seagulls descended upon the flying popcorn like a ravenous army, viciously pecking pedestrians and each other in their frantic quest for each loosed kernel. The two hoods from the beach, rushing up the stairs toward us, fell back when faced with the fluttering, vulturous cloud.
Charlie and I plunged into Gillian’s Wonderland Pier.
37
The sound of the calliope puffing away, the smell of the popcorn popping, the crush of the crowd moving thick and slow in the narrow gap between two kiddie rides. We tried to force our way through but were swallowed whole and carried leisurely along by the viscous mass. Kids wiped their noses, grandfathers rubbed their backs. To our left was a balloon race. To our right a mini-NASCAR raceway.
“They’ll come after us in here,” said Charlie.
“It won’t be so easy to find us in the crowd.”
“Which way?” said Charlie.
“Down there,” I said, pointing to a ramp that led toward the rear of the park.
We made our way, bobbing and weaving through the family groups, grandparents and grandkids, teenagers looking flushed and bored at the same time. We didn’t even glance back until we reached a fence at the entrance to Canyon River log flume. We took a moment to survey the whole of the crowd.
“You see them?” said Charlie.
“Not yet.”
“Maybe they went the other way.”
“Sure,” I said, “and maybe cigarettes are good exercise for the lungs.” I stopped jabbering for a moment and thought. “How do you think they found us?”
“They didn’t follow me,” he said, and he was right about that. And being as this had been a two-man meeting, that left one dope to take the blame.
“I didn’t spot them,” I said.
“How long you think they been following you?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and then I thought about Ralph Ciulla and I felt a great gaping dread.
They had been following me from the start, the sons of bitches, waiting for me to lead them to their targets. And like the stupid pisspot I was, I did exactly that. When Ralph and Joey found me, they found them, and, putting it together, Fred probably took a picture and sent it to Allentown so that the killer would know exactly whom to ask his bloody questions and with whom to leave his bloody message. Son of a bitch. So first I had led them to Ralph, and now I had led them to Charlie.
“We have to get out of here,” I said.
“No kidding.”
For a second I looked at Charlie, short and heavy, sweating with effort and fear, still haunted by his mother, as threatening as a koala bear. Charlie was as unlikely a hood as ever I saw, and it got me to wondering.
“Joey Pride was telling me about that time in the bar that Teddy Pravitz first brought up the idea of hitting the Randolph Trust.”
“Yeah, I remember it. Teddy promised the whole thing would make men of us, change our lives forever.”
“Did it?”
“Sure,” he said. “Look at me now.”
“But here’s my question. Teddy obviously had the plan to do the Randolph heist before he ever walked into that bar. So why did he need you guys?”
“Manpower.”
“He could have latched onto professional hoods if he wanted.”
“He didn’t want hoods, he wanted guys he could trust. And besides, it wasn’t like the four of us, we didn’t have skills.”
“Skills, huh? Like what?”
“Well, Joey Pride was a genius with engines and electricity. Whatever alarm system the place had, he could disarm it, and take care of the lights and the phones, too. And Ralphie Meat, besides being huge and strong, was a metal guy. Could bend anything, solder anything, melt anything.”
“Like the golden chains and statues?”
“Sure.”
“And Hugo?”
“Hugo had his own little skill. He used to sit in the back of the room and imitate all the teachers to a tee, crack us all the hell up. He did my mother better than she did. ‘Charles, I need you now. You come here this instant.’ He could become anyone he wanted.”
“And what about you, Charlie?”
“Well, you know I worked with my dad at the time.”
“And what did he do?”
“Dad was a locksmith,” said Charlie. “Wasn’t a lock made that he couldn’t open in a heartbeat. And he taught me what he knew.”
“Locks, huh?”
“And safes. Later, with the Warricks, safes became my specialty.”
“Must have come in handy up in Newport. Let me show you the picture of that little girl again now that the light’s better.”
“I don’t want to see the picture.”
“Sure you do.” I took the photograph of Chantal Adair out of my pocket, showed it to him again. “You recognize her?”
He glanced at it and pulled back. It was a small movement, as quick as an inhale, but there it was.
“Never seen her before,” he said.
“You’re lying to me.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“I have to represent you, Charlie, but I don’t have to trust you. Oh, crap.”
“What?”
“They’re here, or at least one of them.”
Just at the edge of the arcade, with his white baseball cap and a retro Celtics jersey, chains glistening, stood Fred, the older, pear-shaped hood who had roughed me up outside my office. He had a phone to his ear. He stepped forward, peered into the crowd, scanned our direction without registering our presence.
“What do we do?”
“Let’s get to the rear exit,” I said. “But slowly. You see the little guy?”
“What little guy?”
“He’ll be in the same outfit, just a different jersey. He’s shorter than you, wider than a Buick. My guess is he’s on the phone, too.”
“You mean that guy?” said Charlie.
“Yikes.”
Louie was standing right at the exit. He was also on the phone, standing on tiptoe, trying to see over the shoulders of a pack of tweens. It didn’t look like he had spotted us yet.