“About fifteen minutes ago, sugar. The client just called my friend, and said he’s all set in California.”
“For how long?”
“What?”
“How long is he going to be accounted for? How long have I got to do this?”
The voice turned honey-sweet and dumb. “Well, I don’t really know. My friend didn’t tell me, and I didn’t know I was supposed to ask.” The voice seemed to gel and turn cold. “Aren’t you ready by now?” There was a distorted windy sound, and he could imagine her blowing smoke from a cigarette across the receiver. “I’m not about to call him back. I’m standing at a pay phone at a 7-Eleven way across town, and he—”
“Forget it,” said Varney. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it. See you in a few days.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“What?”
“I just told you. I rushed out to a 7-Eleven after dark alone just to do this. Not to mention setting it all up and waiting a week for a stupid phone call.”
His jaw worked, his teeth clenched. After a moment he said, “Thank you.”
“That’s more like it. Good-bye.” She hung up.
He placed the telephone back on its cradle, walked to the closet, and put his special suitcase on the bed. He was concentrating now, getting himself ready, and Mae’s voice was an irritant. “Was that the call?”
His concentration was broken. “Uh-huh.” He took the plastic bags that contained his clothes, tools, and weapons out and set them on the bed, examining them once more, then returned them to the suitcase.
“Can I go with you?”
He turned to her, his brows knitted. “I’m going up there to kill somebody.”
“I know,” she said, but her features were pinched together in what looked like confusion. He supposed that she must be surprised that she wanted to go, and wasn’t sure whether she was being stupid. “I won’t bother you or get in the way. I won’t even talk if you don’t want me to.”
“Why do you want to go?”
She shrugged. “I just thought it might be nicer.” Then she tried to carry an idea to him, but she didn’t seem to know exactly what it was, so she talked around it. “For you, you know? Somebody to listen if you wanted to talk afterward, maybe to drive if you got tired.”
He was intrigued. She had absolutely no comprehension of what this was, or how it felt to be the one who did it. But she had been sitting here in silence, talking herself into doing exactly what he wanted her to do. He had been expecting he would have to fool her or threaten her, but she was practically begging him. It made him curious, so he ventured, “It’s not going to be fun. You could stay here in this fancy hotel and get some sleep.”
She looked upset, as though she was being forced to drop a comforting pretense and admit something. “Please. I don’t want to sit here all alone wondering what’s happening: if you’re going to come back for me, or if I’ll just be sitting here for days.”
He let enough time pass so she would believe he was slowly working his way through her reasons and overcoming his surprise at her request. “All right,” he said. “Get ready.”
She stood and flung her arms around him. “Thanks, Jimmy. You won’t regret it.” Then she released him. “What do I wear? Something dark?”
He went to the closet, pushed hangers aside, pulled a couple out, and tossed them on the bed. “These will do.” The hangers held a pair of black tailored pants with a razor crease, and a dark blue blouse.
“What about—”
He anticipated her question. “These.” He tossed a pair of flat black shoes onto the bed. They were ones she had worn once when they had gone for a walk. She looked at the outfit critically for a second, then seemed pleased. She quickly began to dress.
When they were both ready, Varney said, “Okay. Now we clean up. We don’t know if we’re coming back to Minneapolis or not, but probably we won’t. So we pack. We wipe off everything that’s smooth and might hold a fingerprint: doorknobs, faucets, the phones, the desk, TV, everything. Use a towel.”
Twenty minutes later, Varney stopped and threw his towel on the bathroom floor, and she imitated him. “Check the wastebaskets,” he said. “Anything in them, we take.”
She stood still. “They’re empty. I wiped them off because they were smooth, so I noticed.”
“Good. Now we go.”
They took the elevator to the ground floor, and Mae paid the bill in cash and checked out while Varney waited in a big armchair across the lobby near a table that held a white telephone.
They got into the car and Varney let Mae drive for the first stretch. It was dark, and after a half hour they were beyond the range of most of the cars being driven north by commuters. It was safe for him to change his clothes in the passenger seat.
“You know, I had an idea,” he said.
“What is it?” She kept taking her eyes off the road to look at him, and that made him nervous. He had intended to let her drive all the way up so he could stay fresh, but he was tempted to change the plan.
He said, “The problem with that farm is that there’s no good place to park where people can’t see the car from the road. What if you drove me near the farm, stopped for just a second while I got out, and took off? You could give me, say, two hours to go the rest of the way on foot through the woods, drop the hammer on this guy, hide the body, and walk back. What do you think?”
“What do I do then?”
His confidence that he had constructed a good plan began to seem optimistic. “You come back, stop the car again, and pick me up. We leave.”
“No,” she said. “I mean, while you’re gone. Do I just keep driving for an hour and then turn around?”
He had to stop himself from saying, “Who gives a shit?” He supposed the question was not as stupid as it had sounded. She was right. It could make a difference. He looked at his watch. “By the time you’ve dropped me off, it will be around midnight. It’s probably better not to be driving around alone. After you drop me, go back to Hinckley, park in the lot at that hotel that says Grand Casino. It’s probably the only place you could go around here that’s not suspicious. Go inside and play the slot machines for a couple of hours and come get me.”
“Is that safe?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Places like that are full of security people. It’s probably safer than a bank.”
“But those places have surveillance cameras, don’t they?”
He nodded, mildly surprised that she knew. “Yes, they do. If they get you on tape, you know what it will show? That you were in a casino pumping quarters into a slot while this guy was getting killed. And there’s going to be fifty other women doing the same.”
“Oh,” she said. “Yeah. I’m sorry. I just never thought like this before.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Now I’ve got to do some thinking, so I’ll have to be kind of quiet for a while.” He stared ahead at the road, going over each part of his plan, forming an image in his mind of himself performing each step. Within a few minutes, he felt his heartbeat had begun to go faster, stronger, his muscles had begun to feel ready. He put on his thin, tight goatskin gloves, lifted the plastic bag that contained his weapons, and set it on his lap. He took out two of the pistols, both Beretta Model 92’s like the police used, a silencer, and two extra ammunition clips, and slid the bag under the seat. He slipped the knife into the short sheath, strapped the Velcro strips around his ankle, and covered it with his pant leg. He put the silencer, magazines, and one pistol into various jacket pockets, then pushed the second gun under his belt at the small of his back and covered it with his jacket. They were nearly to the exit for Route 48 now, and when he saw it, he said, “Pull off here.”
When they passed the brightly lit sign for the casino he said, “That’s the place where you go.” He pulled out his wallet and said, “Put this in your purse. There’s about two thousand in it. Use what you need to keep gambling. Nobody in a casino bothers you if you’re gambling.” Then he had a sudden worry. “Don’t drink alcohol, or try to buy drugs. When this is over, you can get as fucked up as you want.”