Sure, Will thought.
Secret Service or not, every cop in the world was identical to every other cop, and they were all fuckin crooks. Next thing you knew, eight thousand bucks would find its way into a fund for the widows of Secret Service men who had died in the line of duty. Only thing he didn’t understand was why Horne was granting a possible kidnapper the opportunity to flee. He watched as the man meticulously copied the serial numbers on all the bills, signed the sheet of paper with the numbers on it, and handed it to Will. He looked for his parka, found it where he’d draped it over one of the chairs, and put it on.
“I don’t have to warn you not to leave the city,” he said.
“Not while you’ve got all my money,” Will said.
“See you later,” Horne said, and put on the hat with the ear flaps, and walked out of the apartment.
It was twenty minutes to five.
So what do I do now? Will wondered.
Hell, I’m an innocent man here!
Except for the burglary.
But Horne hadn’t been interested in any burglary, Horne didn’t even know any burglary hadhappened. Horne had been interested only in the hundred-dollar bills that had maybe or maybe not been paid as ransom in a kidnapping case he was investigating—but how come the Secret Service? Anyway, that was the entire scope of Special Agent David A. Horne’s interest. The money. Check the serial numbers. If they match, come fetch old Wilbur here.
But let’s say the serial numbers donot match. I mean, out of all the millions of apartments in New York City, what are the odds on my breaking into the only one that happens to be the apartment of a redhead who’d done a kidnapping and stashed the ransom money there? What are the odds on that kind of thing happening? I mean,really. A thousand to one? A million to one? I’ll take odds like that on a horse any day of the week.
So the odds have got to be in my favor, right? The serial numbers will not match, Horne will come back with my money, I’ll sign off on the receipt, and he’ll apologize for having taken so much of my time.
I hope, he thought.
AT FIVE MINUTES TO SIX that Thursday evening, Cass walked into Eyewear Fashions, Inc. on Stemmler Avenue and Twenty-second Street. The evening was clear and cold. Pinprick points of stars dotted a black sky, and the streets and sidewalks glistened with fresh snow, but Cass did not have a white Christmas on her mind. All she wanted to do was find the man who’d taken her money and her mink stole and her long sable coat, which should have been keeping her toasty warm on this frighteningly cold day. She’d been a cold puppy all her life, and the first thing she’d purchased from the money she’d earned on the Mexico job was the sable. Hell with people who went around in the nude protesting the wearing of furs. Anyone ever tried to spray paint on her furs was somebody who’d better already own a funeral plot.
Instead of the stolen sable, she was wearing the short red fox jacket over blue jeans and a green turtleneck sweater, freezing her ass off nonetheless. One of the reasons she’d left Fall River, Massachusetts, was that it had been so damn cold up there. That and her father shouting hell and damnation at her day and night. Her mother was a mathematics teacher. Cass guessed she thought it made sense to marry a Presbyterian minister and then present him with two daughters, one of whom grew up to be a holy person like Papa. The second and youngest, Cassandra Jean Ridley herself, fed up to here, ran away from home instead. Went to live on a commune in New Hampshire, which was even colder than it was here on this street corner in Isola. Left there when the group’s youth advisor came into her room naked one midnight clear, determined to read to her out loud a short story fromHustler magazine. Cass clobbered him with a frying pan.
“Hi,” she said to the man behind the counter, “my name is Harriet Daniels,” which was the name of the woman who’d run the rooming house she’d lived in down in Eagle Branch, Texas. “I found an eyeglass case with your store name on it, and I was wondering if you could help me locate the owner of the glasses.”
“Well, gee, I don’t know,” the man said.
“You are?” she asked.
“Wesley Hand,” he said.
He was perhaps twenty-eight or twenty-nine, a round little man with moist blue eyes and a pleasant looking face except for the complexion. He looked sincerely concerned about the eyeglass case she now put on the counter top. He also looked bewildered. She guessed that was his natural expression.
“Is there some way you could do that for me?” she asked. “Help me locate the owner?”
“That might be difficult,” he said. “Except for some very special prescriptions, most eyeglasses …”
“Isn’t there some machine or something you can put them on?” she asked. “To see what the prescription is?”
“Well, sure, but …”
“Because maybe it’s one of thespecial ones, you see.”
“Well …”
“I would appreciate it,” she said, and flashed what she hoped was a warm and convincing smile.
“I close at six,” he said, and glanced up at the clock.
“Well, how long would it take …?”
“And I have to be someplace.”
“The thing is, I found them earlier today,” she said. “So chances are he’ll be missing them by now.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So could you put these on your machine and see if …?”
“Not now,” he said. He was already moving around the counter toward a small closet on the side of the shop. “Call me tomorrow morning,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said. He was putting on his coat. “I appreciate it,” she said, and smiled sweetly.
You prick, she thought.
HORNE CAME BACK to see Will at ten-thirty that night. He came unannounced, and when he pressed the buzzer downstairs to say he was there, Will was enormously surprised. He’d never expected to see those hundred-dollar bills again. Tonight, Horne was wearing a blue car coat with a faux fur collar, wide wale, dark brown corduroy trousers, and a brown fedora. By comparison to this afternoon, he looked positively dapper.
“Will, I must apologize,” he said.
“Why’s that?” Will asked.
“These arenot the ransom bills.”
“I didn’t think they were,” Will said, but he was tremendously relieved nonetheless.
“We checked the serial numbers, and except for that one bill they simply didn’t match. So … I’m sorry for whatever inconvenience the Department may have caused you …”
“What department is that, by the way?”
“Why, the Treasury Department,” Horne said, looking surprised. “The U.S. Secret Service is part of the Treasury Department.”
“I didn’t know that,” Will said.
“Not many people do,” Horne said. “So if you’ll just let me have that receipt I gave you earlier today …”
“Okay,” Will said, and fished in his wallet for it.
Horne carried the receipt to the kitchen table, sat, removed from his briefcase a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills, and handed them to Will.