The facts themselves were spare.
A woman had left her husband.
She’d done so only three days before.
She’d left from Montauk, Long Island, and gone to an as-yet-unknown place.
She had not taken her own car.
Mortimer had offered nothing beyond these scant details save that his “friend” did not wish to reveal himself but promised to supply considerably more information about his wife, at least as far as where she might have gone and by what means she’d gone there.
In itself, his client’s reluctance to identify himself was not unusual. In such situations people on the other end of the arrangement were often jealous of their privacy. He’d worked for politicians, high-profile businessmen, actors, and musicians. No one was safe from the eternal tendency to fuck up. That was one of the things Stark had learned over the years, that rich, famous, and even quite intelligent people could suddenly find themselves neck deep in trouble. Their personal relationships abruptly spun out of control because they’d screwed the wrong person or trusted some grifter who’d promised five bucks for every nickel they invested. Human life went forward on a sputtering wave of such mindless improvisation. On some otherwise normal day a line drive went foul. A man met a woman, took her to bed, awoke to find a psycho in his arms. Or he let a stranger buy him a drink, talked a little about money, turned over half a million to a thief. There were a thousand ways for a life to go disastrously awry. And when it did you looked for a way out that didn’t blow what was left of you to smithereens. You found someone who could make the necessary correction, have some face time with the face you wanted to wipe out of your life. Oftentimes, the job reduced to simply that, a single eye-to-eye confrontation, one Stark always ended with a standard chilling statement, This is over… as of right now. Whatever you thought you were going to get, you’re not going to get it. From this moment on, you only start to lose. How much you lose is up to you.
He’d delivered these words scores of times, to distraught mistresses and wily con men and well-heeled drug dealers, and the look in his eye and the tone in his voice had rarely failed to do the trick. No matter how venal or stupid or psychopathically greedy people were, they never failed to know when the man they were dealing with couldn’t wait to die. A man who regarded life as nothing more than a long, boring wait at the airport held the ultimate means of intimidation. No one wanted as his enemy a man whose only friend was death.
Of course, there’d been those few exceptions even to this rule. People who didn’t trust what they glimpsed in Stark’s eyes, didn’t really believe he was what he appeared to be, dismissed his lethal stare as a bluff.
But Stark never bluffed. That was, he thought, the ultimate secret of success. If you said you’d walk away, you walked away. You said to yourself, I don’t fucking care, and you turned and you didn’t look back. And if you said you would do a thing, you did it no matter what the cost. You said to yourself, I don’t fucking care, and you did it, and it was done, and you never calculated the risk you’d taken, nor ever the size, be it large or small, either of the penalty or of the reward. Not to care what you won or lost, this was the cold, hard ground of dignity, and standing on that ground was the only thing that made life bearable.
Stark knew that he could convey all of this in a single deadly glance. But he also knew that inevitably some people would fail to read that glance correctly. And so, on those very rare occasions when he’d had some doubt that the point was made, he’d simply ratcheted up the stakes, drawn the nine-millimeter from his jacket, and kindly asked the offending person to open his mouth. The object of Stark’s attention always did so, his eyes widening as Stark pressed the blunt steel barrel into their gaping mouths, careful to scrape the sensitive roof with the metal sight, and thus cause that little nip of pain that so eloquently underlined the desperate nature of the case.
The problem at the moment, however, was that Stark was no longer sure of what his assignment was. Mortimer had asked for a favor, but reluctantly. He’d never done that before, and it was this odd twist in the road that now chewed at Stark relentlessly, urging him to get to the bottom of Mortimer’s strange behavior.
But how? He decided he would pretend that he believed Mortimer’s story. He would tell himself that whatever peculiarities he sensed in the deal might well be harmless, and on that assumption he would work in the normal way, using whatever information Mortimer brought him as the springboard for further investigation.
He took a regional map from the file and spread it across his desk. Since the runaway wife hadn’t taken her own car, the husband would first need to determine if his wife had taken a cab either to her destination or to some other form of transportation. There were several small airports in the vicinity of Montauk. It would not be hard to determine if the woman had used any of them. There were also several bus depots in the area, as well as a single commuter train. The bus or train could have taken her into New York, from which she could have gotten passage to anywhere on earth.
The trick, then, was to narrow the field, shrink the wide world of possibility into a small, tight knot of likelihood. But that couldn’t be done until the husband supplied the added information he’d promised Mortimer. Until it came, Stark could only wait.
But waiting was hard, and even as a child Stark had noticed how little patience he had for the undone deed. He liked to be on the hunt, and if he were haunted by anything, dreaded anything, it was the idle time between jobs. During those intervals, he felt his life grow numb. It did not surprise him that soldiers of fortune were prone to suicide. For how could a man who thirsted for danger possibly endure the absence of it, the long days when he felt himself imprisoned in an empty and unlighted room. He knew the usual means by which such men made the clock move. Drugs. Alcohol. Whores. But the drugs wore off, and the alcohol drained away, and the whore finally had to dress and find another john. And after that, the soldier lay in the dull aftermath and dreamed of jungle firefights, the thrill of being cornered, wounded, left for dead, the ecstasy that ever accompanies the narrowest escape. Denied this primal excitement, how banal and uneventful the rest of it must seem. And so why not press the barrel to your head if the hourly alternative offered nothing more than the unbearable pall of the commonplace?
Stark drew the nine-millimeter from the drawer of his desk, caressed it with affection, thought of Marisol, and marveled with what dreadful accuracy Neruda had hit the mark, understood that in the sickly sweet smell of aftershave the total horror was revealed.
ABE
Abe recognized the man who came toward him from the front of the bar as a semi-regular, a guy who came in sporadically, took a place in the darkest corner he could find, and ordered scotch without designating any particular brand. He wore a faded black suit, with shiny pants that fit him badly, and an old hat that looked as if it had been run over by a truck, then pounded back into shape. Over the years, they’d had a few conversations, but Abe had learned little beyond the guy’s first name and the vague notion that he was some kind of investigator, though exactly what type the man had never said, save that he “found people.”
“How you doing, Morty?” he asked now.
“Abe,” Mortimer said. He slid onto the stool opposite.
Abe smiled. “What’ll you have?”
“Scotch,” Mortimer said.
Abe usually poured the house brand, a cheap blended scotch that wasn’t all that bad. But Mortimer looked so hangdog, he decided on a better one, grabbed a smooth single malt and poured a shot.
Mortimer knocked it back quickly, with no sign that he tasted any difference.