'Jake?' Anna asked. 'What're we doing?'
'Waiting,' he said. 'Tony ought to be here any minute.'
'What?' She turned and looked out of the library; the front door was out of sight, but it was right around the corner.
'We'll hear the car,' he said. 'He'll either put it in the garage and come in through the kitchen, or he'll leave it in the drive and come through the front door.'
Anna was confused. 'What? We're gonna jump him?'
'More or less,' Harper said. He pushed a few more books on the floor. One of them was a fake: the cover fell open to reveal a hollowed-out interior packed with money. Harper turned and gazed at her for a moment, weighing her, and then said, 'That's why we're here.'
She thought she could talk him out of it: 'Jake, we can't do thistoo much could go wrong. Somebody could get hurt, bad.'
But he wouldn't move. 'I've done stuff like this two hundred times. Tony oughta be paranoid enough that. And then they felt, rather than heard, arrival sounds from outside. Harper said, 'Quiet now. just stick with this.'
He dropped to his hands and knees and crab-walked into the front room. From her angle in the office, she could see him easing up to a crack in the drapes.
Five seconds later he was back: 'Shit. He's with somebody. Another guy. Stay with me, Anna.'
'Aw.' She was trapped: a bad idea that she'd ridden too far, and now it was too late to get out. So she crouched, tense, and Harper pulled the nylon over his face, and waved a hand at her, and she pulled hers down. Then Harper took the gun out of his pocket and they waited.
Tony came through the door and he was shouting when he came through: 'You don't tell me that shit, you don't tell me, you just fuckin' well better.' He was a short, paunchy man in his late thirties, wearing a gray dress suit, a striped tie over a blue silk shirt; the man with him was tall, thin, with a mustache, a deep tan and a black leather briefcase; in good shape, like a serious tennis player. When Harper, with the mask and gun, stepped out of the office, his double-take spun Tony around in midsentence.
'If either one of you fuckin' move, I'm gonna blow your fuckin' heart right through your fuckin' spine,' Harper growled. His gun, held in both hands, was pointed at Tony's chest. 'Lay down on the floor, on your backs, heads toward each other, top of your head toward the top of his head, arms stretched out so they overlap.'
'What the fuck.'
'LAY ON THE FUCKIN' FLOOR,' Harper screamed, and the pistol began to shake and jerk, and Anna could see him chewing on the nylon mask; if he was acting, he was terrific. If he wasn't, he was crazy. 'LAY DOWN, YOU MOTHER FUCKERS, OR I'LL.' Saliva and anger seemed to choke him and he gnashed at the nylon, and suddenly his teeth broke through and he ran three steps toward Tony, the gun poking out at Tony's forehead, and Tony screamed back, 'No, no, no.' and the two men got shakily down on the floor, lying on their backs, arms stretched over their heads.
Harper, gun fixed on Tony's head, fished a pair of open handcuffs out of his pocket and dropped them on Tony's face. 'Put them on. I want to hear them snap shut.' Tony put them on. The tall man was next: 'Thread ' em through Tony's, then snap 'em.'
'I'm just a lawyer.'
'Yeah, yeah, yeah. you fuckin' scum, you fuckin' lawyers. You fuckin' lay there.' The language had been stolen from Tarpatkin, but had a drug-fired sound to it, a crazy emotional edge. Harper stepped to the door and pushed it shutslammed it. Then he bent over the men, patted them down, found a cell phone in Tony's coat pocket, tossed it aside. To Tony: 'You got a dealer working the Westwood area. He was selling wizards down to the Shamrock Hotel last week.'
He was a street thug, Anna thought: he was doing it perfectly. Maybe too perfectly. He moved to one side, put his foot on the lawyer's chest.
'. I'm gonna give you the convincer. I'm gonna shoot your lawyer here, free of charge. Just to show you that I'm serious. Shoot him right in the fuckin' brain, so you're attached to a dead man, you can explain to the cops later, YOU FUCKIN' CREEP.' He was shouting again, and the lawyer was screaming, 'No, no, no,' trying to sit up, but pinned by his hands over his head and the weight of Tony on the cuffs.
Then Harper, looking down at the lawyer, stepped back far enough that Tony couldn't see him, looked at the frantic lawyer, put one finger over his lips, pointed the gun at the floor beside the lawyer's head and fired once.
The lawyer jerked forward, convulsing with the muzzle blast, then fell back, understood instantly: He went limp and silent.
'NOW YOU BELIEVE ME?' Harper screamed.
'You'll fuckin' kill me anyway,' Tony screamed back. 'So fuck you.'
'Not before I peel your fuckin' skin off with a potato peeler I seen in your kitchen,' Harper said. Tony twisted, and Harper kicked him in the chest and Tony shouted, 'Stan, goddamn, are you dead? Stan, goddammit.' And Harper kicked him again, and Anna, out of sight, tried to wave him off, but he ignored her. He had the gun pointing at Tony's head and he was shouting again, 'ALL RIGHT, MOTHER FUCKER, I DON'T HAVE THE PATIENCE TO SKIN YOU ALIVE, SO I'M GONNA KILL YOU NOW. GOOD FUCKIN' BYE.'
Tony was thrashing against Stan's dead weight and Harper pointed the gun and Tony screamed, 'John Maran at the Marshall Hotel on Pico, for Christ's sake.'
Harper's voice went suddenly soft, and somehow more threatening. 'You better be telling me the truth,' he said. 'If you're not, I won't be coming back.'
'What?' Tony was confused.
'Get on your feet, lawyer.' Harper kicked the lawyer once, and the tall man rolled over, started to blubber. Tony shouted, 'You asshole, whyn't you say something.'
The lawyer, stooping over him, pulled down by the short play of the cuffs, shouted back, 'You crazy fuck, they were gonna kill us, I saved our lives.'
'You bullshit.' Tony tried to get up, but Harper pushed him down. 'Stay down.' And to the lawyer, 'Drag him over to the basement stairs.'
As the lawyer dragged Tony toward the stairs, Anna noticed the cell phone, picked it up, put in her pocket. In the basement, Harper put them on either side of a steel support pole and threaded the cuffs through. 'Like I said, if there's no John Maran at the Marshall Hotel on Pico, I ain't coming back.'
The lawyer had followed this thought, but Tony hadn't: 'So fuck you,' Tony said.
'Tony.' the lawyer said.
'Fuck you, too, you fuckin' snotty Yale asshole.'
The lawyer took a deep breath, and said, 'Look, I'm trying not to wring your fat little neck, Tony.'
Tony was amazed: 'What'd you say?'
'I said, I'm trying not to wring your fat little neck, you dumb shit. What he's saying is, if he leaves us here, what're we gonna do? Chew our arms off, like rats? We won't break these handcuff chains or this pipe.'
Tony finally caught it, looked once around the blank walls of the basement, and turned to Harper, 'Hey, man.'
'Is Maran right?'
After a moment of judgment. 'No. Ask for Rik Maran. You ask for John Maran and. you won't get him.'
'Better be right,' Harper said.
They went up the stairs, Anna first, and at the top, they peeled off the stockings. When Harper started past her to the door, she set her feet and hit him in the solar plexus as hard as she could: Harper's abdomen wasn't his toughest part. He half caved in and took an involuntary step back, eyes wide, and wheezed, 'Jesus, Anna.'
'You sonofabitch, you scared my brains out,' Anna whispered harshly, not even knowing why she was whispering. 'I didn't know what you were gonna do. You should have told me ahead of time.'
'I was afraid you wouldn't go along.'
'Oh, bullshitwhat haven't I gone along with?'
'Well, anyway, we got the name,' he said, trying to straighten up. He got going again, and led the way out the back, across the patio and down the hill. And when they got to the car, he avoided her eyes, but said again, 'We got the name.'
'Yeah, we've had four names. We've been on a name safari all week and we haven't gotten anything but a chain letter,' she snarled at him over the top of the car. 'We haven't found out anything.'