Villada laughed.
Karen reached for the phone on her desk, intending not to call the police but to summon Halloway for help. Ortiz slammed the butt of his revolver down on her hand. She pulled it back, winced, held the throbbing fingers to her breasts. Her lip was quivering, but she did not scream.
“We’ll be back,” Ortiz said. There was blood on the butt of the pistol. He yanked a tissue from the box on Karen’s desk, wiped the butt clean, and tossed the stained tissue into an ashtray. “Get the fockin money,” he said.“Real money this time,comprende?”
“Or we’ll kill every fockin one of you who works here,” Villada said.
Not if we kill you first, Karen thought.
“I HAVE NO IDEA what money you mean,” Halloway said.
“The money your two blond ladies took from me,” Wiggins said.
“I don’t know which ladies you mean.”
“Sheryl and Toni. With the long legs and the AK-47.”
“We have no such employees. Mr. Wiggins,” Halloway said, slowly and distinctly, “you are making a terrible mistake here.”
Their eyes met again.
This time Wiggins read the meaning in them.
Which was perhaps why he drew a pistol from a holster under his jacket. He pointed the gun first at Halloway, and then swung it around toward Douglas, as if to emphasize that his enmity was large enough to include both of them. The gun looked like a snub-nosed .38. Douglas didn’t think the man was foolish enough to kill them here in their own offices, especially since he was here to negotiate the return of money he felt was his. But who knew with these street thugs?
Halloway had been in hairier situations than this one. Not for nothing was he in charge here. He looked at the gun in Wiggins’s hand, and then raised his eyes to meet Wiggins’s again. His eyes seemed to sayThis is only about money, friend. Do you really want to die for it? But would Wiggins have pulled a gun on them if he didn’t realize he was already a dead man?
“You don’t want to do this,” Halloway said.
“I’ve done it before,” Wiggins said.
“Not with the consequences this would bring.”
Douglas knew this was bullshit. If Wiggins had in fact killed Jerry Hoskins, there had been no consequences at all. Wiggins must have realized this, too. He had blown one of them away, and the only thing that had happened was The Wierd Sisters coming to call. Douglas wondered if, in retrospect, Halloway was thinking he should have given the termination order back then on Christmas night. A bit late now, though.
“Tell you what,” Wiggins said. “I realize you don’t have that kind of money juss layin aroun in cash. But go get it, okay? I’ll come see you sometime soon,” he said, and backed away toward the door.
Sometime soon, you’ll be dead, Douglas thought. Bro.
Wiggins stepped out into the hallway.
THE THREE MEN reached the elevator at about the same time. One of the two Mexicans pressed the bell button set in the wall.
“How’d it go?” Wiggy asked them.
“Fockin people still owe us money,” Ortiz said.
Which was how a rather strange triumvirate was founded.
IT WAS STILL THURSDAY on what was shaping up to be the longest day of the year, never mind what the almanac said. Sitting at his desk at a quarter to five that evening, the squadroom almost deserted, Carella tried to make some sense of this bewildering case that seemed to focus entirely on money, real or largely imagined. Theimaginedcash appeared to originate in Iran, where billions of dollars in so-called super-bills were being printed on intaglio presses with plates provided by the good old U.S. of A., talk about payback time.
Carella knew some things for certain. The rest he could only guess at. He knew that Cass Ridley had made four trips to Mexico with a certain amount of money she’d exchanged for some kind of controlled substance, and had been paid $200,000 in cash for her efforts. This money was real, if the lady at First Federal could be trusted, whatever her name was. But Cass Ridley had also been given a ten-grand tip by the pair of Mexicans involved in the transaction, whoeverthey were, andthat money was fake. Poor Will Struthers, trying to spend the cash he’d pilfered, had twice been nailed passing phony hundreds. According to the lady at First Federal, Antonia Lugosi or something, twenty billion dollars in counterfeit hundreds were floating around out there, enough bogus bills to concern the Treasury Department, who had relieved Struthers of the phonies he’d stolen and given him real cash in exchange—but that was only a guess. Belandres! AntoniaBelandres! Hence the Lugosi association, forBela Lugosi, the best Dracula there ever was, the mind worked in curious ways its wonders to reveal.
Carella wished with all his heart that this case would reveal itself as clearly to him as Lucy’s throat had been revealed to the count all those years back when Carella first saw the black-and-white film on television, the count’s head descending, his lips drawing back, the fangs bared, Carella had almost wet his pants.
The money in Jerry Hoskins’ wallet was real, too. No question about that, the Federal Reserve had run it through their machines, the hundred-dollar bills were genuine. But Jerry Hoskins had worked for Wadsworth and Dodds, and the man who’d set up the flying arrangement with Cass Ridley also worked for W&D, though there seemed to be some confusion about whether or not Randolph Biggs wasalso a Texas Ranger, which Carella sincerely doubted—but that, too, was a guess.
Lots of guesswork here, no hard facts.
He wondered what time it was in Texas.
He looked up at the wall clock, opened the bottom drawer of his desk, took out his massive directory of law enforcement agencies, found a listing for the Texas Department of Public Safety headquarters in Austin, figured somebody would be there no matterwhat time it was, and dialed the number. He told the woman who answered the phone what he was looking for, was connected to a sergeant named Dewayne Ralston, repeated everything again, and was asked to “Hang on, Detective.” He hung on. Some five minutes later, Ralston came back onto the line.
“Nobody in the Ranger Division named Randolph Biggs,” he said. “You landed yourself an imposter, Detective.”
“While I’ve got you on the line,” Carella said, “could you check for a criminal record?”
“Don’t go away,” Ralston said.
Carella didn’t go away. Across the room, he could see Kling at his desk, hunched over a computer. Cotton Hawes was just coming through the railing that divided the squadroom from the corridor outside. Telephones were ringing. In one corner of the room, the squad’s meager Christmas tree blinked holiday cheer to the street outside. From the Clerical Office down the hall, he could smell the aroma of coffee brewing. This was a very familiar place to him. He felt suddenly sad and could not have explained why.
“You still there?” Ralston asked.