“What? Goddamn!” the whiner shouted.
“Forget Mallory,” said the authoritative one, who’d evidently already been filled in by Hulk about my visit, whereas it seemed to be news to the whiner. “We can handle him. We got him covered.”
Covered? What the hell did they mean by that?
“Well, even without Mallory, it’s still hotter,” the whiner said. “There’s a murder in it now, and things are going to be hot and stay that way.”
The authoritative voice was edged with anger this time. “I know that. Why do you think we’re moving out tonight if I didn’t know that?”
“I tell you, it bothers me,” the whiner continued, trying a new tack. “I don’t feel right about that old dead lady.”
“For Christ’s sake. Forget that old bitch.”
“It’s not that I give a damn about her, exactly; it’s I do give a damn about getting stuck with a murder rap just because the old bag up and died on us.”
“I’m getting sick of your goddamn complaining.”
“Yeah? Well I’m getting sick of your goddamn orders. You’re not running this show. Frank is.”
“Well, Frank says we’re going ahead with it. Right now.”
“Well, the hell with Frank and the hell with you,” the whiner said, a new toughness in his voice. “You and P. J. here can go ahead, but me, I’m going in the house and have a beer and see if I can cop a feel off P. J.’s woman. Let me know what happens.”
I heard a door slam, and the other two guys started in grumbling. I strained to make it out, finally caught a piece of what the authoritative guy was saying-“Let’s go talk to the stupid bastard”-and heard the door slam again.
I cracked the door of the can. Peeked out.
They were gone.
Gone back inside the house, I guessed.
I put the lid down on the toilet and sat, tried to get my heart working again, ran my fingers across my scalp to see if my hair was standing on end. Then I rose, ran some water in the sink, and splashed some on my face. It was good to be alive. It was good not to have any more cracked ribs than I already had; it was good not being kicked in the nuts.
I opened the lavatory door and walked back like a ballerina into the garage. My top priority was now to get the hell out of here and call Brennan. Obviously, going by what these guys had been saying, there was something on for tonight. Actually, a couple of somethings. It plainly sounded like they planned to get out of Port City by next morning, pack up and clear out.
But something else was up, too.
One last job, maybe? Groundwork was laid, the one guy had said, a pity to waste it. That had to be it, then: one last job, tonight.
On my way back over to the window, I stopped at the van. Out of almost idle curiosity, I tried the back doors of the van. Unlocked. I swung them open and looked in.
Empty.
That cinched it. Since they were planning to clear out of town by dawn, you would think the van would be loaded full of goodies. But no. Totally empty. Which meant one thing: there was one final farewell job planned for tonight. This van would be filled, but at some victim’s house. By nightfall this vehicle would be crammed full of possessions and valuables earned and collected by somebody in a life of hard and probably honest work, only to be ripped off by some punks with a collective IQ in the neighborhood of Lee Trevino’s average golf score.
I started closing the van doors, then stopped short.
Voices.
Voices outside the building, right outside the building, and the door was opening.
Damn! They were back already.
I ducked inside the van and closed the rear doors. Not all the way, but gently, so I could eventually nudge them open and hop out again when all was clear.
Sure.
“Well,” the authoritative voice was saying, “screw him then. The two of us can do it.”
“Hell, yes,” Hulk said, uncertain.
And I heard a sound that had to be the garage door going up.
And another sound that had to be the rear doors of the van being pushed tight-shut.
And another that had to be the van’s motor starting up.
We were moving.
20
It was dark in there. Not a trace of light was coming in around the edges of the double doors. No air, either. A hot, stuffy box; not an oven, but a damn close second; not a coffin, but just as disquieting. It was almost enough to make me homesick for that john back at the garage.
One thing kept me from tumbling into depression’s abyss, and that thing was the pair of scissors. I sat clutching them as if they were a crucifix and I was expecting vampires.
Because it seemed inevitable that before long I’d be confronting those two guys driving the van, and if it hadn’t been for those scissors, even my money would be on the van drivers. But having a weapon of sorts, and having the element of surprise on my side, gave me decent odds… though stabbing somebody with a pair of scissors wasn’t something I was looking forward to. After all, stabbing people with scissors was for psychos, and I was supposed to be one of the good guys.
However, at times one can’t be too choosy about one’s options, and I was lucky to have any option at all, and damn lucky to have something sharp and lethal with which to do battle against those dull and lethal boys up front in the van.
The shocks on the vehicle were all but nonexistent, and I’ve had smoother rides falling down a flight of stairs. But that too was a lucky break-and to hell with comfort-as since the ride was jostling and the vehicle naturally noisy, I didn’t have to worry much about keeping down my own level of sound. Although when we went over those railroad tracks just three blocks from Tony’s, I bounced around like a sack of grain and must’ve come within a hair of alerting my unknowing captors of my presence.
I examined the interior of the van and found nothing, not one thing, except some loose dirt on the slightly rusted-out floor. I went over the walls slowly, carefully, like a blind man reading braille-but not getting nearly as much out of it. A close check of the doors proved equally futile. The one on the right did have a square maintenance port near the latching mechanism, but feeling my fingers around in the hole told me nothing; perhaps if I had some slight mechanical know-how, it would’ve been different, but all I could get out of it was grease on my fingers. I considered prying the blades of the scissors around in there, but decided not to risk breaking them. I waited till we were going over a particularly bumpy stretch of road and, under cover of vehicle noise, laid my shoulder into the twin doors, hard. Nothing gave, except my shoulder. Some vans have doors that can be sprung open from within if you give ’em a shot right in the middle where they join; it’s a very weak spot, from a structural point of view. But these doors-even though the van wasn’t a recent model-were rugged and didn’t budge. So I gave up.
I sat and let the rough-riding van knock my butt around, let it jounce me till my ribs hurt past pain. I deserved it for being idiotic enough to hide in a van in the first place. This is not to say that I was going to capitulate. I had given up on beating the van, but not on beating the van drivers. Those scissors were so tight in my fist, they could’ve been some strange, deadly deformity. I was tense with the knowledge of what was ahead of me. I was resolved to violence in a detached way like nothing I’d felt since Vietnam.
At first it was no trouble keeping track of where we were going. Even when my attention was focused on exploring my cell, I could perceive from the sounds of traffic that we were headed out of South End and into town. I felt the sway of the right turn past the pump factory and knew we’d be rolling down Mississippi Drive, and after maybe half a mile we turned again, left, into the downtown.
Then I got lost. Traffic sounds petered out, and several consecutive turns conspired to make me lose all sense of direction. We were, I supposed, winding through some residential area, God knew where. All I knew for sure was we weren’t driving around on the bottom of the river.