“Stay,” said Joe. “Well, Kate, speak now or forever hold your peace.”
Kate allowed herself a last moment of hesitation, then nodded stiffly. “All right. I don’t like it, but maybe you know what you’re doing.”
“Let’s go inside, then,” said Joe. “We can chat over a beer, like the old friends we are.”
“Fine,” I said. I saw my wallet and pocketknife lying on the grass a few feet away and retrieved them. “I’ll go check the driveway to see if we have any other visitors, then meet you inside.”
5
The beer was actually Ipswich Ale, a brew made north of Boston and favored by Begay. By me, too. There is no bad beer.
We sat in Joe’s small living room in front of his fireplace, where kindling and logs had been laid but not lit.
I put Kate’s pistol on the coffee table in front of me. She looked at it thoughtfully, then sat down across the table from me.
Now that I could study her when she wasn’t aiming that pistol at me, I confirmed that she was indeed a very attractive woman. Midthirties, I guessed, and surely Eurasian. Her up-country fall clothing was formfitting and her boots were good for pavement or forest path. She didn’t have a purse, but instead wore a winter coat with pockets aplenty in which she apparently carried her essential gear. Very practical. I wondered if there was a backup pistol somewhere in those clothes.
When we each had a glass in our hands, Joe said, “First, I’d better introduce you two. J.W., this is Kate MacLeod. Kate, this is J. W. Jackson.” Kate and I nodded expressionlessly at each other, and Joe looked at Kate. “It’s your show,” he said.
Her voice had lost its chill and was almost silky. She had a faint accent I couldn’t identify. Whatever it was, it triggered a memory, as do certain aromas, of my past, in this case of my brief tour in a long-passed Asian war. Was the accent French? Vietnamese?
“You know about Edo, Francis, and Susan,” she said. “Edo’s car blew up in Lisbon, Susan OD’d at home, and Francis was collateral damage when somebody robbed his favorite deli just as he was buying himself some kosher salami. Edo was on a job, but Francis and Susan were back in D.C. minding their own business.”
“Just as you and I are doing right now,” said Joe.
Kate nodded. “When I heard about Susan, my ears perked up because Susan wasn’t much of a user; and when I heard about Francis I began to see the Easter Bunny behind every tree.”
“He’s got other people thinking about him, too,” said Joe.
She nodded. “Yes, but none of them was on our trade mission. The building across the street from my apartment has parking in back and a rear entrance, so I moved into a room there where I could see into my own place. I didn’t use my own name, of course.
“I left a note on the door of my real apartment to an imaginary maid, rigged the lights to go on and off at reasonable times, and now and then I’d let myself be seen going in or out of my building, although I never actually went back to the apartment.
“After about a week I decided I was paranoid and should stop imagining things, but then I saw a curtain move in my living room. Somebody was in there and was taking a peek outside. It was what I was watching for but it still gave me a jolt.”
“I can imagine,” said Joe in a gentle voice.
She gave him a small smile. “I watched to see who came out the front door of the building, but nobody unusual did, which meant that whoever had been in my place was still there or had left by the rear door of the building or looked too normal to catch my eye.
“I waited another day, then went over to the apartment. I figured the door wouldn’t be booby-trapped because the Easter Bunny probably didn’t want to blow up the maid, if there really was a maid. Inside, things looked pretty normal, but I took my time looking around. I don’t know if I found everything, but I found enough. Needles beneath the upholstery of the seat cushions in my reading chair and sofa, and another under the bottom sheet of my bed.”
“And you figured it was time to leave home for a while,” said Joe. “You were right. Did you call the firm? They should be able to sanitize the place while you’re gone.”
“I haven’t called anybody,” said Kate. “I came here with the suitcase I’d taken when I moved across the street. Nobody knows I’m not in Bethesda. I figure that if the Bunny comes here after you, he won’t be expecting me to be here, too, and that’ll give us the edge.”
“The apartment has to be cleaned,” said Joe. “Even if you never go back to it, somebody else will move in and before that happens, it has to be safe. I’ll make a call.”
She shook her head. “No, Joe. If you do they’ll know I’ve been in touch with you. It’s better if they don’t.”
He studied her. “You think there’s a loose tongue in the firm?”
“I don’t want to take the chance. The Bunny’s getting his information somewhere.”
Joe rubbed his big chin and I heard my voice say, “I’ll make the call. To Spitz. He can relay it on to your people.”
Kate frowned but Joe nodded. “I know Jake,” he said. “That would work.”
“Who’s Spitz?” asked Kate.
“FBI.”
“Jesus!” Her voice was filled with disgust. “FBI? You trust the FBI?”
“I trust Spitz,” said Joe.
“You trust this guy, too,” said Kate, anger making a snarl of her voice. “You’re beginning to have a lot of faith in people, Joe. Maybe it’s time you got out of this business.”
His smile was small. “I also trust you, Kate.”
She sipped her beer, then sighed and shook her head. “Maybe I’m the one who should quit. It’s getting too hard to be happy.”
“Wait until I kill the Bunny,” said Joe. “Then it’ll be safe for you to find another line of work.”
That was the second time I heard Joe say he was going to kill the Bunny. During all of the years I’d known him, I’d never heard him mention killing anyone, not even when we were in ’Nam. Even Kate seemed surprised at his words, maybe because people in her line of work prefer to use euphemisms when referring to violent or illegal acts.
“Do you want me to contact Spitz?” I asked Joe.
Joe looked at the woman. “I think it’s the thing to do. If J.W. does it, there won’t be a direct link to you and me. The Boss won’t be surprised to get Spitz’s call, because he probably knows by now that you’ve gone underground.”
“I’d prefer to keep it in the firm,” said Kate. “Your friend here and this Spitz guy are outsiders.”
“You may not have found everything the Bunny left in your apartment,” said Joe. “You know what I mean. There may be more needles in the clothes in your closet and bureaus, or in the rugs. Or something may be hooked up to one of your kitchen appliances or your toilet.”
“Yes, yes,” she said impatiently. “All right, do it your way. Have your friend here call his FBI pal.”
“My name’s Jackson,” I said. “My friends call me J.W.”
“I know what your name is,” said Kate. “You told me and then I saw your ID when I took your wallet away from you. Remember?”
“How can I forget? When I picked it up I was glad to see that my money was still in it.”
“There wasn’t much to steal.”
“A thief would have to rob me every day for years in order to make any money.” I looked at Joe. “What do you want me to tell Spitz?”
Joe gave me a telephone number for Spitz to call, and Kate gave me the address of her apartment in Bethesda, then said, “The message is that the Bunny’s been there and left needles where people sit and sleep, and that the cleaners should be very careful. Spitz should say that he doesn’t know where I am but that I’m fine. He shouldn’t say more.”
“I’ll tell him that.”
“I don’t want him to say who called him or from where.”
“I guess I’d be jumpy in your place, too,” I said. “But you can trust Jake.”
“This business can ma
ke you sick,” she said irritably.
More than one shrink has hypothesized that you have to be at least a little sick to go into the spook business in the first place. Could be, but the same could be said of people who go into a lot of professions, including psychiatry.
“I’ll have to go home to make the call,” I said. “I don’t carry Jake’s number around with me.”
“As fate would have it,” said Joe, “I just happen to know that number.” He told me what it was, and looked at Kate. “Now you have it, too,” he said. “It may come in handy for you someday. The Bureau may not be on your list of favorite organizations, but Jake Spitz is okay.” He handed me his cell phone.
I punched the number and the voice on the other end of the line asked who was calling.
“An old friend of Jake Spitz,” I said. “I’d like to talk with him.”
“May I give him your name, sir?”
“He can give it to you if he wants to.”
“I’m afraid Mr. Spitz isn’t available right now. May I take a message and have him get back to you?”
“Tell him it has to do with the Easter Bunny.”
“One moment, please.”
In less than a moment Jake was on the line. “Spitz here. Steve says you want to talk with me.”
“J. W. Jackson here.” I gave him Joe’s and Kate’s message.
“I’ll take care of it,” said Spitz. “Anything else I can do?”
“Not that I know of. If there’s a plan, I haven’t been told about it.”
“I can guess what it might be,” said Spitz. “If you see anyone who might be interested, tell them that the Bunny has engaged the attention of the CI and that the gears are turning down in D.C.”
“I’ll do that.”
I rang off and gave the phone back to Joe.
“They’ve probably traced this call by now,” I said.
He shrugged. “They may have traced the call, but they won’t know where the phone is. That’s the nice thing about short messages on cell phones.”
I told them what Spitz had told me.
“Good,” said Joe. “Now you can go back home and go scalloping again. Kate and I will take care of the Easter Bunny.” He stood up and put out a big hand. “Thank you and good-bye.”
I shook the hand, then watched as Kate reached across the coffee table and picked up her pistol.
She weighed it in her hand, then smiled a strangely warm smile. “How about the bullets? Do I get them back, too?”
“You have a sensitive touch,” I said. “Not everybody would have noticed the difference in weight.”
“You know how we girls are,” she said. “Always conscious of extra ounces.”
I dug the bullets out of my pocket and dumped them on the table.
She dropped the magazine out of the pistol and started loading it with bullets. “You’re safe,” she said, giving me an oddly hungry look. “I’m not going to try to shoot you again.”
“Once was enough.” I looked at Joe. “You’d better take a good look at Toni’s car before you use it. Don’t forget that the Bunny likes poisoned needles.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Joe.
“If you need me for anything else, let me know.”
“I will but I won’t. The Bunny is an urban cowboy. He operates in cities. He doesn’t know country roads as well as I do. When he comes here he’ll be on my turf.”
I wondered if Kate was equally at home on the range or was just wearing country clothes.
“What if he doesn’t come here?” I asked. “What if he decides to wait for you to leave the island?”
“He’ll come,” said Joe. “I’ve laid out bait he can’t refuse.”
“What bait is that?”
“Me.” Joe smiled a smile that would have frozen Custer’s heart. “He’ll come.” He waved at the door. “Now go home, J.W. If everything goes as it should, Toni and the kids will be back here in a couple of weeks and you won’t hear any more about the Easter Bunny.”
I normally consider myself to be fairly irresponsible, except for my obligations to my family, but I owed my life to Joe and I didn’t like leaving him with only Kate at his right hand.
“Are you sure you don’t need some more help?” I asked.
“Kate and I can handle it.”
So I went home and when Zee arrived after work at the hospital and was full of questions about Begay, I told her that I’d met Kate, but not how, and what I’d learned about the Easter Bunny. I didn’t mention Kate’s willingness to shoot me.
When I was through, Zee surprised me by frowning and saying, “I knew other countries had killers working for them, but I didn’t know that we do, too.”
I thought of a professor I’d once had who told me that he was in the disillusioning business. His students came to his classes with illusions and he helped them shed them. He was not the most popular prof at the university, but he was one of my favorites.
For the next two days I went scalloping with Mike Look out in Cape Pogue Pond.
In Edgartown the scallop season opens around October 1, and for the first month only family permits are allowed. Each scalloper wades out onto the flats with his or her peep sight (known locally as a “Buck Rogers,” in honor of the space adventurer who, long ago in the twenty-fifth century, wore a glass-fronted helmet while dodging ray-gun blasts), towing a basket supported by an inner tube, and sporting a long-handled dip net.
The game is to use the peep sight to spot the scallops lying on the pond floor, to dip them up, and to fill the basket. The limit is a bushel a week per permit. On a good day, you can get your limit in half an hour. On a bad one you can get skunked. On a lovely, sunny, windless day, you can scallop in a T-shirt and you’re in heaven; on a cold, windy one, with waves splashing icy water over the tops of your waders, you freeze your bippies.
At the end of the month the professionals get to go to work. Their tools are a boat with a culling board and a number of drags, and they can work in deep water beyond the reach of the waders. They put out the drags and pull them along the bottom until they think they’re full, then winch them in and dump them on the culling board.
They keep the scallops and shove everything else back overboard—the seaweed, the rocks, the conchs, the broken shells, the pieces of junk, and the rusty tin cans. They toss broken glass and bottles into a waste barrel, put out the drags again, and repeat the process. When the scalloping is good, a man can make a lot of money, but winter scalloping is a wickedly cold way to make a living, and late in the season, just before spring, the pickings are thin and life is even harder. But for Mike and me, it wasn’t spring yet. There were a lot of scallops and we did well. The deer hunters did equally well ashore, and in the papers, letters from the VETA people boiled with moral outrage.
Then, three days after I’d brought Joe home from the Cape, I saw Kate in the Bunch of Grapes bookstore in Vineyard Haven when I went in for the latest Bill Tapply novel. She was reading a white-jacketed book in the biography section and not paying much attention to her fellow customers.
One of them, however, was paying attention to her. He was a slender man in his thirties, wearing a stylish green winter coat and a felt hat decorated with a little feather in the headband. He was pretending to browse but he was really keeping an eye on Kate while she read. When she finally decided not to buy the book she was examining and went out into the street, he followed her.
I put down my book and went after him. He was about twenty feet behind her when I brushed past him and said, “Kate! How nice to see you!”
She turned like a cat, one hand thrusting into a coat pocket. Behind me I heard the sound of scurrying feet. I turned and saw the man in the green coat trot away across the street, dodge a car, and disappear down toward the Stop and Shop parking lot.
I turned back and Kate was staring at me with feral eyes, her hand still in her coat pocket.
6
“Was that him?” I asked. “Was that the Easter Bunny
?”
She was angry. “What are you doing here? Why are you following me?”
Anger begets anger. I tried to repress my own. “I’m not following you, but that guy was. I was in the store to buy a book. Did you see him? Did you recognize him? And stop pointing that damned pistol at me!”
She took her hand from her pocket.
“You’re getting careless,” I said. “He was watching you in the bookstore and he was right behind you on the sidewalk when I called to you. Well, did you see him? Do you know who he is?”
She shook her head. “I only saw his back. I didn’t recognize him.”
“Because you were really looking at me instead of at him.”
“What if I was? What difference does it make? I don’t know what the Bunny looks like. That could have been him but it may have been an innocent bystander.”
He hadn’t looked so innocent to me, but maybe he was just a guy hot for a beautiful woman. Maybe he’d gone after her to hit her up for a date.
“I’m not your enemy,” I said. “You’ve got to get that idea out of your head and open your eyes to other people who might be. First you got lost in that book you were reading and then you stayed lost right here on the street. Your mind was somewhere else when it should have been focused on why you came here to the Vineyard.”
She looked up and down the sidewalk. It was a chilly day and there weren’t too many people nearby, although I recognized one woman coming toward us. “I needed a break,” Kate said. “Joe and I have been up there in the woods too long. Nothing’s happened. I’m a city girl. I need some entertainment. I’m getting claustrophobic.”
Boredom has probably done in a lot of people. They get twitchy and leave their safe places and go out into the world, where they get into trouble. I offered Kate that opinion.
She frowned, then nodded. “You’re right, but this waiting is getting on my nerves. The damned Easter Bunny is taking his time getting here.”
“He may already be here,” I reminded her. “That may have been him just now. Did you see the guy’s face at all? Would you know him again?”
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