“Back to the bedroom,” I said.
He started walking down the hallway. When we got to the end, he veered toward the master bedroom.
“No,” I said. “The other one.”
I wanted him to use the spare bedroom, because I had new sheets on the other bed, and the bed in here just had some old ragged ones I wouldn’t mind messing up. Also, there was a plastic liner.
“Get in,” I said, motioning to the bed.
He hesitated, showing confusion and, for the first time, worry.
“Don’t screw it up now,” I said. “You been fine up to here. Very professional. I respect that. So do as I say, and maybe you’ll be around tomorrow. Get in bed.”
Reluctantly, he climbed under the covers. There was more light in here, as the drapes were back and the light from the street a quarter-mile over was seeping in. I saw his face: young, rather blank, his features very ordinary but not unpleasant. His skin was extremely pale, the cold-reddened cheeks fading now.
“Pull the covers up around your neck,” I said. He did.
“Now what?” he said, speaking for the first time.
And the last.
The silenced nine-millimeter made its thudding sound and I went back out into the living room to get into the dead man’s clothes.
2
I sat on the floor in the spare bedroom with my back against the dresser and played dead. The second guy would be coming in sometime within the next five to ten minutes and, hopefully, would in the darkness assume the figure dressed in black, slumped on the bedroom floor, was his partner; and that the blood-spattered shape in the bed was me.
I didn’t have to fool him forever; all I wanted was a second. One second for him to be confused, seeing things not as they were but as I wanted them seen. One second, and I could take him without a struggle.
It would have been easier, of course, to just shoot him. But I couldn’t do that. Not and kill him, anyway. I could have shot him in the arm or leg, I suppose, but that wouldn’t necessarily incapacitate him. Some people can put up a pretty good fight, despite a wound. Some people can even be more dangerous wounded than not; getting shot pisses them off, and the next time you shoot it better be to kill.
And killing was out of the question, at this point, at least. I had to talk to this guy, which is why I wanted to avoid any extended struggle with him. In a struggle, people can get hurt. They can even get killed. And like I said, I had to talk to this guy, and if one of us was dead, talking would be pretty well ruled out.
That was where all of my precautions, all my strategy had begun. Three and a half months ago I had tried to burn same bridges behind me, but I knew the possibility existed of a bridge or two surviving my incendiary efforts. And if such was the case, someone-I didn’t know who, exactly, but someone-would decide to have me hit. The contract would very probably be handled by a team of two; one would carry out the hit itself, the other would be the backup man. From the very beginning I had known the best way to handle that eventuality would be to kill the first man in, and then wait for the backup man, who, seeing his partner dead, might be persuaded to give me certain information.
Precisely what that information would be, I couldn’t say. I hoped for the name of the man who had hired the two killers, but that was a slim hope. Most likely the assignment had been through somebody like the Broker. But with the Broker dead, some other middleman would be involved, and if I could get the middleman’s name, it would be an easy step to the name I really wanted.
So I was prepared for the invasion of my home by men sent to kill me. I had almost been looking forward to it, as until an attempt was made on my life, or until sufficient time had passed-say three years-without any such attempt, my life would be in limbo. And I didn’t have the funds to maintain a three-year vacation. Or, the patience. The cottage has been my home for five years, and I always had enjoyed my quiet, lakeside existence. But that had been when I was working, when I was gone for a week or more on a job, and then would come back for rest and solitude. Year-round rest and solitude, though, could prove boring and probably stagnating. And, in the past, I’d spent a lot of time enjoying myself, with friends (a regular group of us played poker, sometimes as often as three nights a week), and at nearby Lake Geneva, primarily at the Playboy Club. This was a vacation area, with water sports in the summer, skiing in the winter, so there were good-looking women to be had most of the time.
But all of that I’d had to put on the shelf. With the possibility of an attempt on my life coming at any given moment, I couldn’t allow myself the luxury of being distracted. And my poker-playing pals, who were straight types who thought I was a lingerie salesman, might get a little unnerved if our game got broken up one night by gunfire. My sex life had to be forgone, if for no other reason than it’s hard to keep it up when any second you might get shot down. And, too, you tend to be somewhat off your guard when you’re fucking somebody. People have been killed in bed before, it happens all the time, and dying happy is some small compensation, I guess, but no thank you.
All of my attention, then, had been focused on my survival in this specific situation: the invasion of my home by killers. And my biggest worry right now, as I sat slumped on the floor in the spare bedroom, in the company of a man I’d just killed, was that I had overtrained. Not so much in the sense of an athlete who leaves his best game on the practice field; but that I had gone overboard, had devised a paranoid’s plan, and not that of a realist. Had I been too elaborate? I couldn’t help feeling like a silly ass, sitting there playing dead, dressed up in somebody else’s clothes, waiting to point my gun and say, “Trick or treat!”
In the late summer and fall afternoons, when I would sit on my porch studying the shimmer of the lake, watching the leaves turn gold, sipping a bottle of soda (I’m not a beer drinker) and daydreaming about my eventual triumph over the killers who would, one day, one night, invade my lakeside sanctuary, my preparations had seemed sane and necessary. Now, in early winter, the day of the first snow, sitting on the cold floor of the spare bedroom, sharing that bedroom with a dead man, wearing his clothes, pretending to be dead myself, I wasn’t sure.
However I figured it, the second guy would be harder to take. He’d be coming into a situation he assumed had gone wrong. That’s what working backup is all about. Your partner’s late getting back, and you figure something must have got fucked up, and you go in to see what.
If I could have counted on him coming in the same way as his partner, through the window just to my left here in the spare bedroom, all I would have had to do was stand to one side and stick a gun in his ribs as he stepped over the sill. No problem. No struggle.
But he wouldn’t come in the same window. He wouldn’t be coming in at all if something hadn’t gone wrong. His partner had, obviously, made at least one mistake. Going in the same way could mean stepping in the same pile of dog shit as his partner. So the window was out. That much I could count on. That, and that he would be coming in. Somehow.
In the meantime, I waited.
Sharing a room with a dead man can be a less than pleasant experience, especially if the man’s bowels empty when he dies, as is common. All of a sudden you begin to understand how the tradition of flowers at funerals got started. But this corpse had better manners than most, and wasn’t smelling up the room at all. He was, in fact, better company than a lot of people I’ve met.
The only bad thing about him was he was a size smaller than me, and his clothes made a tight, slightly uncomfortable fit. But I did have the silenced nine- millimeter to thank him for, so what the hell. You can’t have everything.
I was just wondering if I could get away with clearing my throat when I realized I wasn’t alone.