Utter skepticism spread across Warnock’s face and crept into his tone. “When’ll you know for certain that it’s on?”
“Tomorrow,” McCorkle said. “Tuesday at the latest.”
“Who’s the opposition?”
“We don’t know.”
“Foreign or domestic?”
“We don’t know that either,” Padillo said. “Does it matter?”
Warnock smiled. “Would I be telling you if it did, Michael?”
Thirty-one
The trunk lid of the Mercedes coupe was open and one of the thieves, bent over, was rummaging around inside. The other thief, half in, half out of the open passenger door, was rifling the glove compartment. Padillo automatically noticed the slit in his car’s convertible top and berated himself for not having switched to the steel top on November 1.
He waited as McCorkle, ducking low, slipped around the rear of four parked cars and came up behind the thief at the open trunk. McCorkle glanced back, got a nod from Padillo, took three long quick steps and slammed the trunk lid down on the thief’s back. The thief yelled. He yelled a second time when McCorkle raised the trunk lid and slammed it down again. There was a third yell when McCorkle, using the rear bumper as a stepping-stool, sat on the trunk lid, all 221 pounds of him.
At the first yell, the thief rifling the glove compartment had backed hastily out of the car’s open right-hand door and turned, only to run his right cheek just below the eye into the point of a Swiss Army knife’s longest blade. The thief crossed his eyes, trying to see what kind of knife it was, but gave up when Padillo used the knife point to turn him around until he faced the car.
“Hands on the roof, feet spread, just like always,” Padillo said.
When the thief hesitated, Padillo touched the knife point to the back of the man’s neck. “If you try anything brave or dumb, the knife’ll go in exactly four centimeters and, unless I miss, you’ll be a vegetable. If I miss, you’ll be dead.”
The thief leaned against the car, moved his feet back and spread them apart. Padillo searched him quickly and found a .25-caliber Beretta semiautomatic in an ankle holster. As Padillo rose, the thief in the trunk yelled something that may have been a plea. McCorkle replied by bouncing up and down once on the trunk lid.
Padillo closed the Swiss Army knife and returned it to his pocket. He then touched the muzzle of the Beretta to the back of the leaning thief’s neck and said, “Now turn around and tell him what I’ve got.”
The leaning thief turned and called, “He’s got my piece, Marv!”
“Lemme out!” Marv yelled.
McCorkle jumped down from the trunk, raised its lid, put a lock on Marv’s right arm, pulled him out of the trunk and marched him over to Padillo. Tears rolled down Marv’s cheeks toward a fixed smile that displayed a great deal of gum.
“Big bastards, aren’t they?” McCorkle said.
Padillo looked at the man with the apparently perpetual smile. “You’re Mr. Schlitz, right? And your partner here’s Mr. Pabst.”
Schlitz’s tears had stopped but the smile was still in place as he nodded. Mr. Pabst wiped his tiny nose with the back of an immense hand.
“Something funny?” McCorkle asked the smiling Schlitz.
Schlitz shook his head but the smile didn’t go away. Pabst said, “He can’t help it. It’s a nervous thing.”
“Reflex.” Schlitz explained, still smiling. “A nervous reflex.”
“What did Harry Warnock say to look for in my car?” Padillo asked.
Pabst shook his head and said, “You’re not gonna shoot us.”
“What you mean is I’m not going to kill you,” Padillo said. “But try this on: a citizen comes out of a bar and finds two thieves stealing his car. The citizen takes a pistol away from one of the thieves and shoots him in the knee. The other thief comes down with a sudden case of good sense and surrenders. Think the cops will like that?”
“They’ll love it,” McCorkle said. “But how do you decide whose knee?”
“Flip a coin and let them call it.”
“And the one who loses the call loses the kneecap,” said McCorkle, nodding judiciously. “It’s only fair.”
“Harry didn’t send us,” Pabst said.
“No?” Padillo said. “Who did?”
“Nobody.”
“Flip the coin,” Padillo said to McCorkle.
“We heard you talking about the book.” Schlitz said, hurrying to get the words out. “The memoirs.” His smile was back after disappearing momentarily when he closed his lips to say the b’s and the m’s.
“Why’d you think the memoirs would be in my car?”
“The way you were talking in there,” Schlitz said. “You were talking real money, three quarters of a mill or more, so we figured you’d keep the thing close by.”
“How’d you know this was my car?”
“When you and him were in the head, we asked Pong what kind of cars you guys drive. He said he didn’t know about your partner here, but you always drove a real old dark green Mercedes coupe. It wasn’t hard to spot.”
“And what were you going to do with the manuscript?” McCorkle asked.
Pabst shrugged. “Sell it back to you.”
“For how much?”
“We hadn’t got that far.”
His disbelief obvious, Padillo said, “And you thought all this up in the five minutes it took us to pee and tell Billy Pong good-bye?”
“If you get an idea, you gotta go with it,” Schlitz said.
McCorkle reached Schlitz with a single step. “I’d better pop this liar back in the trunk while you kneecap the other one.”
The words came tumbling out of Pabst’s mouth, tripping over themselves. “Tinker Burns,” he said. “We were gonna take the thing to Tinker Burns.”
Padillo looked first at McCorkle, who raised an eyebrow that managed to express doubt, surprise and even a little disappointment. Padillo looked back at Pabst. “From the beginning” he said and glanced at his watch. “We’ve got all night.”
It didn’t take all night. It took only fourteen minutes for Pabst and Schlitz, sometimes interrupting and contradicting each other, to describe how Tinker Burns had hired them through Harry Warnock for a vague one-shot that might involve a little breaking and entering.
After first complaining about how little they had been paid, $2,000 apiece, they described how they had shot Steadfast Haynes’s horse, broken into his farmhouse, searched it and bound and gagged “some woman” who walked in on them. But they vehemently denied — despite repeated questions from Padillo and threats from McCorkle — that they had found any trace of the Haynes manuscript.
“What’d Tinker say when you told him all this?” McCorkle said.
“He was sort of pissed off,” Pabst said.
“If you think he was pissed off, imagine what Harry Warnock’s going to be when I tell him I caught you burgling my car.” Padillo paused. “And why.”
Schlitze eyes darted quickly away to his left, Pabst stared down at the parking lot asphalt.
“Harry’s mean,” McCorkle said, making it sound as if he were musing aloud. “And he also knows all those IRA interrogation techniques. The nasty stuff. The first thing he’ll probably ask you is whether you’re really working for him or for Tinker Burns. And no matter what you tell him, he’ll have to make sure you’re not lying.”
Pabst, still staring at the asphalt, muttered, “Harry don’t have to know.”
“Sorry?” Padillo said.
Pabst looked up. “I said Harry won’t know if you don’t tell him.”
“Why wouldn’t I tell him? You sliced my car top. But Harry won’t pay for it unless I tell him what you two did and why.”