Taking his gun from the holster behind him, he squinted into the fog up the hill.
“Dismas, what are you-?”
He put a finger to his lips. “Go!” He watched her for a few steps, then he ran across the sidewalk. The curb was lined with cars. Hardy stepped between a couple out into the street, then turned uphill.
Okay, he said to himself, the guy’s big enough to be Baker. The man wore a heavy coat and a cap pulled low on his forehead. Hardy, crouching behind the wall of cars, did not take his eyes off him. It wasn’t just somebody taking a walk. He came down the street slowly, taking his time, looking into doorways, perhaps looking for a street address. He kept his hands in his coat pocket.
Hardy worked his way uphill. Frannie had disappeared around the corner. He was maybe five cars down from Frannie’s doorway when the guy turned into it. Hardy caught a glimpse of a face in the light from Frannie’s foyer -enough to see it was a black man.
Hardy gripped the gun, moving uphill. The man stood in the doorway, waiting for Hardy to open the door so he could blow him away. Hardy leveled his gun at his back, resting his arm on the hood of one of the cars. The man knocked on the door.
Hardy cocked the hammer. He wondered if this would classify as self-defense, or if he should call out and have Baker turn with a weapon in his hand. Hardy had seen some action in Vietnam, but he had never even considered killing anyone since, at least before this Baker madness started.
He should just pull the trigger and the problem would be over. Baker was wanted for murder. He had killed Ingraham and threatened to kill Dismas Hardy. Now he was here and no jury in the world would believe he was here for an Amway meeting. Shoot first, Diz, and live.
He took in a deep breath and began tightening his finger on the trigger as Abe Glitsky turned around in the doorway and peered into the gloom down the street.
“Jesus Christ,” Hardy said to himself. Not again. He uncocked his weapon and put it in the holster, then stood up and came onto the sidewalk.
“Hey, Abe,” he said. “Fancy meeting you here.”
The three of them sat drinking hot chocolate at the table in the kitchen nook.
“That’s Jane’s house!” Hardy said.
“Is it?” Glitsky asked.
“It used to be ours together, back when Baker went down.”
Frannie still wore Hardy’s jacket, and she pulled herself down into it. “So he was looking for you.”
Hardy nodded.
Even Glitsky seemed to buy it, finally. “If that used to be Jane’s house…”
Hardy repeated the address, and Glitsky said that was it. Hardy sipped some chocolate. “Calling it coincidence gets a little thin about now, don’t you think, Abe?”
“So is he dead?” Frannie asked. “Louis Baker?”
Glitsky shook his head. “Not yet.” He turned to Hardy.
“He took two slugs. They got him in the County General.”
“How’d they get him?”
“He made some noise, turned some lights on-I guess he was out of practice on burglaries, or just overconfident. Anyway, one of the neighbors knew the house was supposed to be empty and called in. Our guys caught him strolling out. When he got cornered he opened up.”
Hardy leaned back in his chair. “So it’s over,” he said. He told Abe about his experiment with the tide.
“Well, not to be picky,” Abe said, “but that still doesn’t make Rusty dead.”
Hardy sighed. “All right, but like you said, it sure strengthens the argument.”
Glitsky held up a hand. “If you had somebody wants to argue. Me, I’m happy enough now it was Baker. He was on the barge with a motive and a handy weapon-ought to be good enough.”
“So you came around to tell me that?”
Glitsky shook his head. “I got the details on the way over on the squawk box. The reason I started over here was I found Louis had been at Rusty’s and I wanted to advise you to keep an eye out.”
“I’ve been doing that.”
“I know,” Abe said. “I’m not blind.” Glitsky wasn’t comfortable with private citizens walking around armed, even if it was his best friend, even if he had a permit. “So how close did you come to doing me?”
“Miles,” Hardy said.
Frannie refilled Glitsky’s mug. “He’s just been worried, Abe. You would be, too.”
“There, see?” Hardy tried to smile, but still felt like someone had kicked him in the stomach. He hadn’t made up his mind whether or not he was going to pull the trigger, but he’d come close enough.
It didn’t need it, but Glitsky blew on his chocolate. “Before I found out about Baker tonight, I thought I’d bring you my file, ease your mind some with some light reading.”
Hardy fingered the manila folder. “What’s to read?”
“This was before we had placed Baker on the barge, remember. To let you know that there were people involved here, good suspects, who didn’t know you from Ezechiel. I thought it might relax you a little, get Louis Baker off your brain.”
“But don’t you need your files?” Frannie asked.
Abe stood up. “I don’t think so, not anymore.”
“What’s the matter, Abe?”
Glitsky’s face hung like a bloodhound’s. His eyes were shot with red. “I figure I’m finished with it, Diz. Nobody cares anymore. You know what I mean… So, it sure looks like Baker, probably is Baker, why don’t we just gas him now and be done with it?
“It reminds me of the movie Casablanca, rounding up the ‘usual suspects.’ Well, that’s not police work. It’s not what I do, so fuck it.” He nodded to Frannie. “Excuse the French,” he said.
Outside the wind came up and whistled against the windows. Glitsky pushed his chair forward and said he had to be going home. Hardy and Frannie walked him to the door.
“So what now?” Hardy asked.
“Like I said, I’m going home. We’ll see you guys tomorrow, right?”
They watched him walk, hunched over into his coat, until he disappeared into the fog, and then Frannie closed the door. She turned to Hardy. “Ezechiel?” she said.
Hardy sat on the couch. The manila folder with Glitsky’s notes lay open on the coffee table in front of him. Somewhere back behind him he was vaguely aware of the shower Frannie was taking. His shirt was off and he had pulled the comforter up over his shoulders and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, reading, and maybe starting to see something for the first time.
He hated to admit it, but with Louis Baker no longer threatening him, the facts of the matter didn’t point all that more strongly to him than to, say, Ray Weir, the jealous husband, or even to Hector Medina, who had had a hard-on for Rusty for years.
Also, Abe had written ‘Johnny LaGuardia’ with three exclamation points after his name, with a notation about his prints being on the fallen lamp. Hardy had never heard the name Johnny LaGuardia, even from Abe, and he wondered what he had to do with anything three exclamation points’ worth.
But then he reminded himself that Louis Baker’s prints were also found on the barge, in the galley, and if Baker was there, then he did it.
Didn’t he?
He stood up, wrapping the comforter around him, and paced from the window to the hallway door and back. The fog seemed to glow in the streetlights, eddying gently now before him as it drifted down the hill.
It came back to him, then, the feeling of seeing Abe loom out of that same fog. Of almost shooting him in the back. Or not almost. Already his memory was getting selective about it. He hadn’t really been going to shoot if it had turned out to be Baker-had he?
Abe kept getting mistaken for Baker, didn’t he? Maybe, on some level, even for Hardy, they all did look alike.
Well, he wasn’t going to lose any sleep worrying over the fate of Louis Baker, who’d been at Rusty’s, had broken into Jane’s house, who for sure was the same badass he’d always been.
“What are you thinking?”