“We’ve got backup,” Vince said.
I took my eyes off the road a second to look at him. “What?”
“Right here,” he said, opening the glove compartment. I saw what looked like the butt of a gun in there. He wrapped his hand around it and took it out.
“You know what this is?” he asked.
“Oh, great. Yeah, that’s a Mixmaster.”
“Do you know what kind of gun it is, smart-ass?”
“No.”
“It’s a Glock 30.”
“Well,” I said. “So that’s the plan. That’s always been the plan. You’re going to shoot everybody.”
“No. At least, not at the beginning.” He leaned across the seat so the gun was no more than two feet from me. “You got any idea how to use one of these things?”
“Jesus, Vince.”
“Do you?”
“You pull on that thing there.” I pointed to the trigger.
He grasped the gun in his right hand, then with his left slid back the top. “That’s how you tell if there’s a round in the chamber. And this is how you remove the magazine, not that that matters.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Just shut up and listen. There’s no safety, you understand? Once you put your finger on the trigger, the safety is off, and once you squeeze, the goddamn thing goes off. If you can figure out how to use this one, you can figure out any one of them. It’s not brain surgery.”
“You’re giving that to me?”
“No.”
“If you’ve got a second one in there, I don’t want it.”
“I don’t,” Vince said. He held the gun on the top of his right leg.
“You’re going to walk into this meeting with a gun.”
“I am. I’ll have it tucked into my belt where they can see it.”
“They may not like that,” I offered.
“I ’spect they won’t.”
“If there’s more than one of them, they’ll just take it off you.”
“That’s what I’d do if I was them,” Vince said.
“You’re not Bruce Willis in Die Hard. You haven’t got another one taped to the back of your head.”
“I know.”
“And you haven’t got a gun for me. I’m not going to be hiding behind some tombstone covering your ass.”
“I know that,” Vince said.
“So you’re going to walk into this meeting knowing you haven’t emptied out all your houses yet, not knowing whether you’ve got what they want or not, and you’re going to let them take that gun off you?”
“I’m counting on it,” he said.
I kept my foot on the gas. I was starting to think Vince was the one Cynthia should have told not to do anything stupid.
“Vince, I swear, if—”
“You trust me?” he asked.
I laughed. “Seriously? You co-opt our cleaning lady, hide money in our house, won’t tell us what really happened to Stuart, and you’ve got the nerve to ask if I trust you?”
Vince went quiet briefly.
Then he said, “Like I told your kid, Stuart was killed in the house. By someone other than Grace. I had my guys text her today with Stuart’s phone, so you’d think he was still alive and back off. But you didn’t.”
“What did you do with him, Vince?”
Another pause, then, “After Grace phoned Jane, Jane phoned me, filled me in. Me and Gordie and Bert swooped in, found the kid. Took a bullet right about here.” He touched his left cheek, close to his nose. “Died quick, I’d guess. Wrapped the kid up in plastic, put him in the trunk. Cleaned the place up best we could, intending to go back, do an even better job, fix the window, which is still wide-open. House probably full of goddamn squirrels and God knows what else by now. We checked the attic, to see if the money and whatever was still there, and it wasn’t.”
Again, I asked, “What did you do with him?”
Vince looked my way. “We fed him to the hogs.”
That left me speechless.
Vince filled the void. “He’ll never be found.” There was sadness in his voice.
I managed to find some words. “And Eldon?”
“I killed him.”
For a second time within ten seconds I had nothing to say.
“He took the news badly,” Vince said. “I mean, who wouldn’t? I understood that. I expected that. But he started accusing me of doing it. Said he was going to the cops. He was out of his head.”
Long pause. Made me think I’d suggested for the last time going to the police.
“You said the future for me was bleak. You’re right. These assholes who left their stash with me, if it ends up I can’t get it all back, well, they’ll get over it. I don’t really give a shit about that. But Eldon” — he shook his head — “that was the end of the road for me, I think. I don’t know if I knew it at the time, but I do now. I’m done. I’ll get Jane back, and then, what happens happens.”
I still had nothing to say.
“You laughed when I asked if you trusted me. So I’m laying it all out there. That’s what’s going on — that’s what I did. You don’t have to like it. But it’s the truth. So when I tell you I’m going into this meet with a plan, I want you to trust me on that. So do you?”
My mouth was dry. “Yes,” I said.
“I know what you think of me. I know you think you’re better than me, and maybe you’re right. You think I’m this unfeeling piece of shit, that I got no heart, and you might be right about that, too. You want the truth? I wish I was a better man.” He paused. “Like you. But I’m not. This is what I am. I can’t pretend to be anything else. But it doesn’t mean I don’t give a shit. I do. About Jane. Pull in here.”
We were coming up on the cemetery entrance. I slowed, turned the wheel, drove slowly through the gates. Vince said, “They said look for a Beemer.”
We moved at about five miles per hour along the narrow paved roadway that wound its way through the gravestones. I looked off to the right and saw a car, and a woman standing by the driver’s door.
“Beemer,” I said.
“She looks familiar,” Vince said. “Her name — at least, the name she gave me — is Reggie.”
I looked for the next lane to the right, made a careful turn so as not to drive over the grass. A hundred feet up, the lane was blocked by the BMW.
“When you’re about five car lengths away, stop.”
And that’s what I did.
“Kill the engine,” Vince said.
I did that, too.
Reggie was slim, brown hair, about five-five, dressed in a black pullover tee and a pair of jeans that looked like they cost more than everything I was wearing, including my phone. She’d moved since I’d first spotted her, her butt perched on the hood, arms folded across her breasts. I thought I could see the outline of a cell phone in her right front pocket.
“I don’t see Jane in the car,” I said. “Unless she’s crouched in the back or in the trunk.”
“They won’t have brought her,” Vince said. “They got to know they got the money first.” He squinted. “This woman made a deposit with me a week ago.” Quiet for a moment. “Why go to all that trouble, then kidnap Jane?”
“Fishing,” I said.
“Huh?”
“They were dropping their line in, seeing where the fish were.”
He thought about that. “If the bags were baited with GPS... They were trying to figure out where I hid the stuff, but there were too many locations. That might be it.”
He slipped the Glock into the waistband of his pants, off to the side by his hip, where it would be in plain view. He opened the passenger door slowly, put one foot down on the ground.
“You coming?” he asked.
I hesitated.
“I’ll ask you again. You trust me?”