“That sounds like a poem,” the man said, as he lay on his stomach on the gravel, trying to turn his head to see Ricky.
“A kind of poem. Now we’re going to have a lesson. Repeat it for me.”
It took several efforts for the kennel owner to get it more or less straight.
“I don’t get it,” the man said, after mastering the poem. “What’s going on?”
“Do you play chess?” Ricky asked.
The man nodded. “Not too good, though.”
“Well,” Ricky said, “be thankful that you are just a pawn. And you don’t need to know any more than a pawn needs to know. Because what’s the object of chess?”
“Capture the queen and kill the king.”
Ricky smiled. “Close enough. Nice speaking to you and Brutus there. Can I give you one piece of advice?”
“What’s that?”
“Make the call. Recite the poem. Go out and try to collect all the dogs that have run away. That should take you some time. Then tomorrow wake up and forget any of this ever happened. Go back to the life you have for yourself, and don’t think about all this ever again.”
The kennel owner shifted about uncomfortably, making a scrabbling sound in the gravel driveway. “That might be hard.”
“Perhaps,” Ricky said. “But it might be wise to make the effort.”
He stood up, leaving the man on the ground. Some of the other dogs had stretched out, and they stirred when he moved. Replacing the weapon in the backpack, Ricky kept the flashlight in his hand, and started to jog down the driveway. When he disappeared from any of the light that flooded the front area of the kennel, he picked up his pace, turning onto the darkened roadway, and heading fast toward the cemetery where he’d parked his car. His feet made slapping sounds against the black pavement beneath him, and he switched off the flashlight, so that he ran in the pitch-dark country. It was a little like swimming in a storm-tossed sea, he thought, cutting through waves that tugged at him from every direction. Despite the night that swallowed him, he felt illuminated by a single, glowing piece of information. The telephone number. It was, to Ricky in that second, as if everything from the first letter delivered to his office, right through that instant, was suddenly part of the same great, sweeping current. And then, he realized, perhaps it went much further. Months and years into his past, where something was catching him up and sweeping him along, but he had been unaware of it. The knowledge should have exhausted him, he thought, but instead, he felt an odd energy, and an equally odd release. He thought the understanding that he’d been surrounded by lies, and suddenly had seen some truth, was like a fuel, pushing him ahead.
He had miles to travel that night, he thought. Highway miles and heart miles. Both leading into his past, and pointing the way to his future. He hurried, like a marathon racer who senses the finish line ahead, beyond his sight, but measured in the pain in his feet and legs, the exhaustion creeping into his every breath.
Chapter Thirty-One
It was a little after midnight when Ricky reached the tollbooth on the western side of the Hudson River, just to the north of Kingston, New York. He had driven quickly, pushing right to the limit of where he thought he could, but not be pulled over by some irritated New York state trooper. It was, he imagined, a bit of a microcosm for much of his past life. He wanted to speed, but wasn’t quite willing to take the chance of truly flying. He thought the created persona of Frederick Lazarus would have pumped the rental car up to a hundred miles per hour, but he couldn’t bring himself to that. It was as if both men, Richard Lively, who hid, and Frederick Lazarus, who was willing to fight, were on this particular drive. He realized that since he’d constructed his own death, he’d balanced between the uncertainty of taking risks, and the security of hiding. But he knew that he was probably no longer as invisible as he once believed he was. He guessed that the man searching for him was close behind, that all the crumbs and threads of clues and indications had been found, from New Hampshire straight back down the highway to New York City, and then over to New Jersey.
But he knew he was close, too.
It was the most deadly of races. A ghost pursuing a dead man. A dead man hunting a ghost.
He paid his toll, the only car crossing the bridge at that late hour. The tollbooth collector was in the midst of a copy of Playboy magazine, staring not reading, and barely looked in his direction. The bridge itself is a curiosity of architecture, rising hundreds of feet above the ribbon of black water that is the Hudson, illuminated by a string of green-yellow sodium vapor lights, descending to meet the earth on the Rhinebeck side in a rural, darkened bit of farmland, so that from the distance it appears like a glowing necklace suspended above an ebony throat, swallowed up by the pitch black of the shore. It was an unsettling ride, Ricky thought, as he steered toward the road that seemed to disappear into a pit. His headlights carved out weak cones of wan light against the surrounding night.
He found a place to pull over and removed one of his two remaining cell phones. He then dialed the front desk number at the last hotel where Frederick Lazarus was scheduled to be staying. It was a desultory, shabby, and cheap place, the sort of hotel that is only a single, fragile step above those that cater to prostitutes and their dates on an hourly basis. He guessed that the night deskman would have little to do, assuming no one had been shot or beaten that night on the premises, which, Ricky knew was a large assumption.
“Excelsior Hotel, how can I help you?”
“My name is Frederick Lazarus,” Ricky said. “I had a reservation for tonight. But I won’t make it there until tomorrow.”
“No problem,” the man said, laughing a little at the thought of a reservation. “There will be as much room then as there is now. We’re not exactly overbooked this tourist season.”
“Can you check to see if anyone left any messages for me?”
“Hang on…,” the man said. Ricky could hear the telephone being placed on the counter. The man came on in a moment or two. “Christ yes,” he said. “You must be a popular guy. There’s at least three or four…”
“Read them to me,” Ricky said. “And I’ll take care of you when I get there.”
The man read off the messages. They were the bunch that Ricky had left for himself, but no others. This made him pause.
“Has anyone been there, looking for me? I was supposed to have a meeting…”
The night clerk hesitated again, and in that hesitation Ricky learned what he needed. Before the clerk could lie by saying no, Ricky told him, “She’s gorgeous, isn’t she? The type that gets what they want, when they want it, no questions asked, right? A lot more high-class than you usually get coming through the front door there, right?”