He pulls out Ming Li’s little silver camera and photographs the page. And the next. And the next. They get worse by the page. By the time he goes downstairs, he’s moving much more quietly. He doesn’t want to wake the dead.
He’s halfway down when he hears the noises from below, a whirring and a faint, repetitive clicking.
Janos is slowed by the crowd on the main floor and has to push his way to the entrance and then run, as fast as he can, around the entire structure to reach the door at the bottom of the stairs. It’s heavy steel, and he pulls it open with both hands, only to hear the indignant voices of the two women climbing back up.
He’s missed Murphy. If it was Murphy.
And now he’s out of position, not watching the girl, not watching Murphy, not watching Shen. He can almost see the thousand dollars he’s been promised floating away, above the roofs of the parked cars. He can’t just go back in and hope everything’s fine. He has to know whether he was right, and he has to know which exit Murphy will take. If it was …
He bats the doubt away and stands still, letting his eyes go soft and unfocused, trying to keep the entire scene in front of him in sight. It’s dark and raining, which doesn’t help. When he’s got the gaze he wants, he very slowly turns his head, taking in the part of the lot that’s visible from this side of the building, looking for nothing but movement.
He gets it, three parking rows away, a short man in a hurry, zigzagging between wet, gleaming cars, not paying any attention to him at all. Janos takes off at a run, up on the balls of his feet to avoid making scuffing noises, trying not to catch up to Murphy but to get a look at which way his car is going, so he can direct Vladimir and the Thai pretty boy who romanced Murphy’s maid. Then he’s to alert Rafferty on the phone, and Vladimir will call to confirm or deny that Murphy is headed home.
Janos slows and stops. He’s a row of cars beyond the one he spotted Murphy in, but he can’t see the man. To his right he hears a car start, and he turns toward it.
And hits his cheekbone on the fast-moving barrel of a gun.
It’s a revolver, Janos registers instinctively, and the sight on the end of the barrel has torn the skin over his right cheekbone. He raises a hand to touch it, but the revolver comes down on top of his wrist, very fast, and Janos knows that a bone has been broken.
Not until then does he look into Murphy’s blue eyes, eyes the color of the sky on a hazy day. Janos steps back, banging into the car behind him, and Murphy says, “Where’s Rafferty?”
Janos says, “Who?”
Murphy lifts the gun until it’s pointing directly into Janos’s left eye. He says, “See this?” and immediately brings the edge of his left hand down on the bridge of Janos’s nose, which breaks. Blood pours over Janos’s chin and onto the front of his shirt, and he coughs and begins to bend forward, but Murphy grabs his hair and pulls him upright. He takes a step back, the gun still pointed at Janos’s eye, and says, “Put your finger under it and push up a little. It’ll hurt like a son of a bitch, but the bleeding will slow. Where’s Rafferty?”
“Your house.” He blinks away the tears, but all that does is show him the gun and Murphy’s eyes more clearly, and he can’t look at the glee in Murphy’s eyes; he’s seen people who enjoyed this before, but not like this. He lets his eyes water. He lets his nose bleed.
“What’s he doing there?”
“Looking for something. I don’t know what.”
“Who else is here?”
“Nobody.”
Murphy raises his left hand again. “You can’t imagine how it’ll feel if I hit it again.”
“Vladimir. And some Thai boy.”
“Vladimir.” Murphy does a little two-syllable laugh. “Talk about the big guns.” He leans in toward Janos, and Janos flinches. “I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Janos.”
“Right, Janos. So, Janos, where’s your cell phone?”
“Shirt pocket.”
“Don’t be stupid now.” Murphy touches the gun to Janos’s forehead and lifts the cell phone out of his pocket. “Rafferty’s number in here?”
“Speed dial two.”
“And Vladimir?”
“Four.”
“Great, we’re making progress. Look, we’re both pros, and I’ve got nothing against you, but I don’t want you warning Vladimir and Vladimir calling Rafferty, so I’m going to need to slow you down a little. Lie down in between these cars.”
That’s when the coffee lets go, and Janos feels the wet heat on the front of his pants. “I … I don’t want to.”
“All I’m going to do is put flex-ties on your wrists and ankles. I know you’ll get out of them eventually, but by then I’ll have Vladimir under control. What’s his car look like?”
“Gray Mazda. Sedan.”
“So what you need to do is let me put the restraints on you and then promise me, one professional to another, that you’ll repay my leaving you alive by not finding a way to get in contact with Rafferty.”
“I don’t know his number. It’s in the phone, that’s all.”
“No problem, then.” Murphy reaches into the pocket of his jeans and pulls out a plastic flex-tie. “Lie down and put your hands behind you, and we’ll get this done, and then we’re square. In fact, I might have work for you in a week or two.”
“It wasn’t personal,” Janos says, going to his knees, and Murphy moves behind him, and their relative positions, the classic execution tableau, tell Janos that he’s wrong, that it was personal all along, and he’s just grasping that and thinking about standing when the bullet, the first of two, tears into the base of his skull.
32
The woman in the bed is beautiful and tiny. She lies on her back, one hand dangling off the side of the mattress. Her eyes are half open, focused on the far edge of the world. Rafferty passes a hand over them, but she’s either unconscious or so deeply intoxicated that she doesn’t register the movement. The room smells stickily of artificial cherry from the two open bottles of cough syrup on the table. He lifts the glass beside them and smells the cherry again, floating against a background of whiskey.
This is Murphy’s life, he thinks. This overstuffed, leaking house, the woman who’s never here, the one dying slowly in the bed, and the child who sleeps beneath that schizophrenic ceiling. The narrow bed, the chipped dresser, the black-and-white memories in the locked room. Whatever it is that visits him when he sleeps. Murphy’s life is all collateral damage.
Tikka-tikka-tikka-tikka comes the sound from the room at the end of the hall. He takes a deep breath, touches the gun again as though it’s a talisman, and leaves the bedroom and its unconscious mistress, heading down the hall toward the light. The pressure of passing time pushes at his back, making him walk a little faster.
The room is big and brightly lit, and on a huge raised platform a small, golden train races around a curving track. The miniature landscape is Southeast Asia, someplace where rubber is grown. Standing just inside the doorway, watching the train click its way through the intricate loops and over the tiny hills, he says, “Hello.”
No response, but he knows she’s here. He can smell her, and it almost breaks his heart. No child should smell like that. No child should be here.
After a moment a voice says, “Who are … are you?”
“A friend of your father’s.”
Silence, except for the train. It negotiates a tight curve, just barely, and Rafferty says, “Should this be going so fast?”