by Don Winslow
“It’s not an either/or situation,” Neal said.
“‘Either/or’?” Lan asked.
“One thing or the other.”
She took another sip of tea, set the cup down, and took Pendleton’s face gently in her hands. She leaned toward him until her face was an inch from his.
“Wo ai ni,” she said softly. I love you.
It was such an intimate moment that Neal wanted to turn away. His Chinese was pretty much confined to Column A or Column B, but he knew that she had told Pendleton that she loved him.
“Wo ai ni,” Pendleton answered.
Li Lan reached out under the water and took Neal’s hand, gently folding his fingers into hers.
His heart started to race.
She let his hand go.
“We will go with you tomorrow,” she said. “Both of us.”
Pendleton’s head whipped around like he’d been jerked on a choke chain and he started to protest, but Li Lan’s hand on his stopped him.
“Your work is important,” she said.
She closed her eyes and settled into the water—the image of perfect repose.
Pendleton couldn’t let it go as easily. “Tomorrow—”
She cut him off without opening her eyes, “—is a dream. Tom and Olivia wish to speak with you now.”
It was one of those don’t-I-hear-your-mother-calling-you bits, and Neal watched as Pendleton dutifully got out of the water, wrapped a towel around his waist, and stomped into the house. So much for the submissive Oriental woman, Neal thought. Then he realized he was alone with Li Lan, and he stopped thinking altogether. They sat there for at least five excruciating minutes before she spoke.
“You will not let them hurt him?” she asked.
Hurt him?! What the fuck?
“Nobody wants to hurt him, Lan. They just want him to come back to work.” I mean, we’re talking about a research lab here, right? not the Gambino family.
“Please do not let them hurt him,” she implored.
“Okay.” Look at me like that, Li Lan, and I won’t even let them hurt his feelings.
“Promise.”
“I promise.” Should be an easy enough request to fill. They want him back so bad they’ll probably give him a raise and a bonus. Monogrammed test tubes. Fur-lined eyepiece on the microscope.
Li Lan stood up. She stood in front of Neal as if inviting him to look her over, as if she were in a lineup at a cathouse. He tried to look away, tried as hard as the booze, the steam of the tub, and his own feelings for her would let him. He felt himself swallowing hard and staring, first at her body and then at her eyes.
“I will go to speak with him,” she said.
Neal looked around for a towel but didn’t see one. “Yeah, it’s about time to get going.”
She shook her head. “No. Wait for me, please. I will come back.”
“Uhhh, would you bring a towel, please?”
“You are shy.”
“Yeah.”
She put her robe on. The silk stuck to her wet skin.
“There is no reason to be shy. I will come back to thank you.”
“Aww, shucks, ma’am. You don’t need to thank me … jes’ doin’ my job.”
He was pretty surprised when she leaned over and kissed him, quickly and softly, on the lips. “I will be back in a moment… to thank you.”
It was a whisper of a promise.
“No,” he said, more reluctantly than he felt real good about.
She looked at him quizzically.
“You don’t understand,” Neal said. “That’s not the way it works. You don’t need to buy … insurance.”
Of course, if you want to leave him and run away with me and live happily ever after, that’s another story.
“It’s not insurance. You have been very nice.”
Right. She’s not buying it. She’s still scared for him, and she’s ready to give it up to get a little added protection. Where does a painter learn about that?
“Really, Lan. No thanks.”
But please don’t ask again, Lan, because I think I’m out of no-thank-yous.
She looked confused for the smallest part of a second, then smiled and shrugged. The robe came off her shoulders with the shrug and she gave him another long look, a think-about-what-you’re-passing-up pose, and it shook him. Backlit by the light coming through the picture window, she looked unreal, unearthly—divorced from the mundane world of reality, and jobs to do, and boring ethics. She became part of a magical evening, of a different kind of life—a world in which he wanted to lose himself, float with her in the mirror mists. He told himself to get up, get out, but she froze him in place, held him in the whirlpool, trapped him in the vortex.
He leaned over to splash some water on his face and barely heard the whine of the bullet that just missed his head and smacked into the wall of the house.
He sank into the water.
4
Terror has a way of clearing the mind.
You can cloud the brain with exotic booze and plain old-fashioned lust, but then shoot a little terror at it, and it will clean right up. Adrenaline is a wonderful thing.
So Neal was already thinking hard as he sank under the water. It was noisy down there, with the filters and bubblers and all, but he could hear Li Lan’s footsteps running, not walking away, and he could hear a car pull out of the driveway and screech down the street. He figured it was either his hosts or his would-be executioners, or both at the same time.
He was in no hurry to surface, though, just in case the shooter still had an eye to the crosshairs and was waiting for him. It took an act of great will for Neal to let himself rise to the surface, dead-man’s-float style, and show the back of his head on the water. He lay there holding his breath and trying not to think about that second bullet smashing into his skull, spattering bone, blood, and brains.
He hadn’t heard the bullet leave the gun, so it must have been silenced, but he sure as hell had heard it smack the wall. You can’t silence that. So he didn’t think the shooter would hang around too long, or even come check on the body. But you never knew … the shooter could be moving on him now, coming up slowly and carefully, with a pistol this time, to deliver the coup de grace. Neal knew he’d never hear him in the noise of the hot tub, never hear the shot that would kill him.
He lay as still in the water as he could, hoping that if the shooter was still there, he was watching him through the scope of a rifle from a distance, where he wouldn’t be able to see if there was blood in the water or not. He held his breath, trying for one more minute, just one more minute, and then he’d make the break.
She set me up, he thought as pain started to shoot through his lungs. Literally set me up. Put me on my feet, up nice and straight where I’d be a perfect target and she’d be safe. But why? I guess I’ll have to find her and ask her.
He sank his head back under the water and then lunged up, diving for the edge of the pool. He rolled twice in the direction the shot had come from and pressed himself against the fence. Forcing himself to count slowly to five, he caught his breath and then scrambled on all fours to the sliding glass door, reached up to open it, and dove behind the sofa.
His skin pricked with the pins and needles of fear.
The house was quiet. Of course it would be, wouldn’t it, he thought, if someone were waiting with a gun. While I crouch here, naked and dripping and just wanting to lie down and cry. Okay, okay, get on with it. Get dry, get some clothes on, and get going. First things first. Let’s make sure we’re all alone in the house.
The first couple of steps were the hardest. He straightened up and walked past the big picture window. He checked behind the breakfast bar, then walked down the hallway and looked into the bedrooms and the baths. He was alone in the house. Where had all his new little friends gone? Off somewhere waiting for all the nasty blood to drain out of the filter system? Pretty damn smart, shooting him in a hot tub. So little to clean up.
They were
so damn confident they had left his clothes right there in the guest bedroom where he had shucked them. His vinyl bag also. That struck him as odd. Why hadn’t they taken his belongings along with them and dumped them? Maybe they were waiting to get rid of them along with his corpse.
He checked his bag. They had clearly gone through it, but hadn’t taken anything. All his nice burglar stuff, his book, even the two grand in cash were all there. Strange, but true.
He took a towel from the bathroom rack and dried himself. Now what would Graham tell me to do in this situation, he asked himself. Easy. He’d tell me to get the fuck out of here, lay low, and call in for help. “No job is so important,” the gremlin had told him more than once, “it’s worth dying for. Believe me, son, the client wouldn’t do it for you.” None of the usual jokes or insults, just a straightforward command: Save your ass.
So, according to the Gospel According to Graham, Book One, Chapter One, Verse One, he should waste no time and haul his butt out of there. But he was beginning to get past the fear into something else: anger. He was starting to get goddamned good and pissed off that they had tried to kill him—would have killed him if he hadn’t leaned over to splash a little water on his face—and he wanted to get a little of his own back. They had made the worst kind of fool of him, set him up in the worst kind of way. Betrayed him.
The absurdity hit him. How could they betray me, he thought? It would be like Christ pulling a pistol on Judas after the kiss.
Nevertheless, he was angry. And scared. Someone had tried to kill him and he didn’t know why and that was a dangerous situation. He put on the black sweatshirt, jeans, and tennis shoes he had packed in the bag, then smeared some black greasepaint on his face. If they were out there somewhere wanting to put a bullet in him, he could at least make it a little harder on them. Then he opened the window and threw his bag out, put both hands on the top of the sill, and swung through, falling gently into some shrubs. It took him ten minutes to find just the right tree, a tall, thick cedar with a low-hanging limb. He hauled himself up on the limb and climbed as high as his fear of heights would let him: about another ten feet.
His perch gave him a nice view of the Kendall household, which was what he wanted. He especially wanted to see what would happen when someone came to dispose of a body that had disposed of itself.
Three hours is a long time on surveillance, but particularly long when you’re literally up a tree. Neal cursed everyone he could think of, starting with Joe Graham, the Man, Levine, Pendleton, the Kendalls, and concluding with one Li Lan, a true artist in every sense of the word. She painted some pretty pictures, all right.
He was still thinking about her when the car—a dumb Saab, naturally—pulled into the driveway, and the Kendalls got out. If they were shaken up with guilt, or hyped with blood lust, or even enervated from a rather special evening, they showed no signs of it. Olivia went straight into the house as Tom went around to the deck. Neal watched as he pulled the blue plastic cover over the tub and then turned the lights out. If there was supposed to be a dead Neal Carey in there, this guy sure didn’t know about it.
Maybe I imagined the whole damned thing, he thought. Then he remembered the sight of Li Lan standing naked on the deck wearing only that smile, and he could hear the sound of that bullet like it was through a headset, and he knew he hadn’t imagined anything. Someone had tried to take him out of the game permanently, and he didn’t have a clue who or why. He waited for another half hour to see if anything more interesting developed. It didn’t, so he let himself down from the tree.
Well, he thought, they suckered me with the oldest combination known to man, booze and a woman. I guess I put one over on them: They wasted their money on the booze.
He moved cautiously but at a steady pace, using the sides of the streets to walk from tree to tree. He knew it would get trickier as he got closer to town, and standing at a phone booth would be the riskiest part, but that was a chance he had to take. He remembered that there was a convenience store on the other side of town, and he headed there. His route would take him through Terminal Square and right past the bookstore and the gallery. It was too much open ground, so he cut north of the square and worked his way toward the sound of running water. He let himself down into the creekbed and followed it south. There was more creek than bed, so he spent most of the walk sloshing through ankle-deep running water—or falling into ankle-deep running water—and it took him an hour to make it to where he thought the convenience store was. He crawled to the edge of the creekbed and peeked out. He had overshot the store by about a quarter of a mile, but there, glistening in the modest parking lot, was a phone booth.
Neal walked back up along the bed, came up to the lip again, checked that the road was empty, and crossed over to the telephone.
He dialed the number he had found in his wallet.
A grumpy voice answered on the eighth ring. “What!”
“Crowe?”
“Who else?”
“It’s Neal Carey. I need your help.”
“Are you having an aesthetic crisis?”
“Sort of.”
Crowe’s Porsche 911—black, of course—rolled into the parking lot just before sunrise. Neal, huddled and shivering in the wet grass on the edge of the creekbank, scrambled across the road and jumped into the passenger seat.
“Drive,” said Neal, “and turn the heat on.”
Crowe put the car in gear, pumped up the heat, and glanced at Neal’s black clothes and black face.
“I can understand a philistine like you trying to emulate Crowe, but do you think you have perhaps taken it a bit too far?”
“Crowe, how do you feel about harboring a fugitive?”
“Are you in trouble with the law?”
“The cops are probably looking for me.”
Crowe’s face broke into a huge grin as he shifted the car into high gear. “A fugitive from the law seeking refuge in the Crowe’s nest! And we thought the Sixties were over! What are you doing?”
Neal crouched down on the car floor. “Hiding. At least until we get over the bridge.”
“Far out.”
Crowe’s Nest occupied the top floor of a three-story house overlooking the Bay from Telegraph Hill.
“A pleasant stroll,” the artist explained, “for Crowe to visit the cafés, bistros, dim-sum places and Italian restaurants that contribute to the overall splendor of Crowe’s existence.”
Neal sat down in a canvas deck chair beside a gigantic sculpture created from the remains of a 1962 Plymouth Valiant, the tailpipe of which was positioned in a fairly impressive phallic display. The walls were decorated with masks—African masks, Chinese opera masks, harlequin masks, even hockey goaltenders’ masks. The walls, the carpet, and all the furniture were stark white.
“The monochromatic color scheme makes Crowe stand out all the more,” said Crowe. “Now please go and cleanse yourself lest you sully the snow-white purity of your present and, may I add, exalted, surroundings.”
Neal took a wonderful, hot shower, scrubbing away all traces of black pancake makeup, mud, and sweat. Then he wrapped himself in one of Crowe’s huge white towels and found that Crowe had laid a white terrycloth robe out for him.
He was further surprised to find that Crowe had used the time to start making breakfast: Texas-style French toast, grapefruit, coffee, and champagne. Crowe motioned Neal to sit down at the table beside the picture window. White tablecloth, white linen napkins.
“I didn’t know you could cook,” Neal said.
“Neither did you know that Rubens could paint.”
“Makes a great sandwich, though. Interesting table.”
“Of course. Nineteen fifty-five Renault drive shaft and windshield glass.”
“Do you always have champagne with breakfast?”
“Every day, since corporate America began to recognize Crowe’s surpassing genius.”
“The French toast is wonderful.”
“When Crowe creates, he cr
eates wonder.”
“What do you want to know about my situation, Crowe?”
“Only how I can help.”
“You’re doing it.”
“Then that’s what I need to know.”
After breakfast, Neal took a cab to the Hopkins. He figured that whoever had tried to shoot him didn’t have a way to connect him to the hotel and, in any case, wouldn’t try to take him out there. Besides, he needed to make a private phone call and pack his stuff.
What he needed to do was talk to Graham. He dialed his number, let it ring three times, and then hung up. He waited thirty seconds and dialed it again.
But Graham didn’t answer. Ed Levine did.
“Where’s Graham?” Neal asked.
“Neal Carey, my favorite fuck-up!”
“Where’s Graham?”
“In the old country, probably slumped over a table in some dirty pub. I’m handling his caseload.”
“I only talk to Graham.”
“I’m sure he’ll be touched to hear that, asswipe, but he’s on vacation. You’ll talk to me.”
Vacation? Neal had known Graham for ten-plus years and had never known the man to take a day off. “Are you kidding?” Graham had asked him. “My job is lying, stealing, and cheating. How much more fun could I have?”
“Neal? Neal, sweetheart?” Levine was saying. “What are you calling for? Have you fucked up the job yet? Maybe paid Pendleton to stay in Frisco and put the hooker on a plane to AgriTech, something like that?”
Something is wrong here, Neal thought. Something is very strange. Careful now.
“I haven’t even found him yet,” Neal said. “He’s not where you guys said he would be.”
“Neal, you couldn’t find your arm in your sleeve.”
Witty, Ed. This was the guy who had once given Joe Graham one glove for Christmas.
“Where is Graham?” Neal asked again.
“Jesus, cut the cord, will you? What is he, your mommy? Seeing as how he had to go to England to change your diaper, he decided to take the ferry ride to Ireland and visit the home of his ancestors. He’s probably at the Dublin Zoo, all right?”