Peril

by Thomas H. Cook

  “There’s no place to park around here,” Mortimer said.

  “Oh, he won’t park,” Caruso said, “the car will drive up and you’ll get in.” He glanced about nervously. “You better have your story straight. You don’t, he could take you to some fucking car-crushing joint and nobody would ever see you again.”

  “You got a hell of a boss,” Mortimer said.

  Caruso’s face turned threatening. “Speaking of which, Batman didn’t change his mind, did he?”

  Mortimer shook his head as a stinging pain swept across his abdomen, bending him forward slightly.

  “What’s the matter?” Caruso asked.

  “Nothing,” Mortimer groaned.

  “You’re pretty out of shape there, Morty,” Caruso told him.

  Mortimer lowered himself onto the steps at the entrance to the park. “Yeah.”

  “You should get on the old treadmill. Get rid of that fucking paunch you got.”

  “One fifty-four, that’s what I weighed in the army,” Mortimer told him. He could not imagine how it had happened, the physical deterioration he’d undergone since then, not only the vanished hair, the spreading belly, and drooping, worthless dick, but the lethal forces that were consuming him now, his liver going south, dragging him into the grave.

  “You was in the army?” Caruso asked. “When was this?”

  “Sixty-seven.”

  “ ’Nam?”

  Mortimer gave no answer. “So, is Labriola gonna show up, or not?”

  “He’s always on the dot,” Caruso said. “Why, you got a fire to go to?”

  “Time is money.”

  “Well, you should think of this, Morty,” Caruso said. “If Mr. Labriola is a minute late, you wait for him. And if he’s an hour late, you wait for him. You fucking stand here and starve to death, but you wait for him, Morty, because if you don’t . . .” Caruso’s eyes suddenly took on a look of animal fright. “There he is.” He nodded toward a Lincoln Town Car as it drew up to the curb. “Okay, go.”

  Labriola was behind the wheel, and as Mortimer drew himself into the passenger seat, he felt something change in the quality of the light.

  “So you’re the sidecar,” Labriola said.

  Mortimer looked at him quizzically.

  “The gofer.”

  Mortimer nodded as the car pulled away. “Mortimer Dodge,” he said.

  “I know your fucking name,” Labriola snapped. “I also know you owe me fifteen grand. Fifteen fucking grand but don’t want to do certain things I want you to do. For example, won’t bring this guy who’s working for me so I can get a look.”

  “I would if I could,” Mortimer said.

  “I like to look a guy in the eye,” Labriola muttered darkly. “I like him to know what he’s fucking dealing with when he’s dealing with me. You know why? ’Cause once he gets a look at me, he don’t have no fucking doubts about where I stand.”

  Mortimer remained mute. It seemed the only safe response to a man like Labriola. You didn’t talk. You listened.

  “So when I hear this guy won’t show, I figure, okay, I’ll take a look at the guy who’s setting this thing up. Which is you. So, okay, now I’m having a look, and what I see is a guy in a cheap suit, with dirty shoes don’t look like they been shined in ten years, and he’s got a look on his face like he just poked the boss’s wife. In other words, I don’t like what I see. So, what you got to do is tell me what I’m seeing ain’t quite right. So, go ahead, do that.”

  Mortimer thought fast. “You remember Gotti? The way he liked being noticed? Fancy suits. Silk ties. Big talk. Shooting off fireworks when the mayor told him not to. Well, he got noticed. But me, I don’t want to be noticed like that. And that’s good for me. And it’s good for my guy. And it’s good for you too, Mr. Labriola. Because it means that when my guy finds this woman, she won’t even know she’s been found. No noise. No flash. He just sees her. He don’t sit down. He don’t chat. He don’t take no notice. He just finds her, and then he tells me, and then I tell you.” He shrugged. “After that . . .”

  “It’s my business,” Labriola said.

  Mortimer nodded.

  Labriola stared at him for a moment, then a loud laugh broke from him, and he grabbed Mortimer’s left knee and squeezed. “Okay,” he said, all boisterous good cheer now. “Okay, we’ll do this thing.” He grabbed the wheel tightly and gave it a jerk to the right. “So, where you want I let you off?”

  “Where you picked me up is fine.”

  The car made an abrupt turn, cruised south on Twelfth Avenue, then swung east, Labriola silent, staring straight ahead, until the car came to a halt at Columbus Circle.

  Labriola drew an envelope from his jacket pocket. “Here’s that information your guy wanted.”

  Mortimer took the envelope.

  “Stay in touch,” Labriola said in a tone of grim authority.

  Mortimer nodded, then opened the door and stepped out of the car. He could still feel the tremor in his fingers as it pulled away.

  CARUSO

  From behind the Columbus monument, he watched as Mortimer stepped out of Labriola’s car, a manila envelope in his hand. The car pulled away, and for a time Mortimer remained in place, the envelope dangling from his hand, looking curiously lost, like a guy who’d suddenly found himself in a foreign city. Then he seemed to come back to himself, glanced about, pocketed the envelope, and began walking south down Broadway until he stopped abruptly as if he’d heard something coming toward him from behind.

  Caruso darted into a shop and stood, peering through the window as Mortimer cocked his head left and right like a guy listening to an argument in his brain. Fucking weirdo, Caruso thought, fucking creepy, this guy. He waited until Mortimer moved on down Broadway, then returned to the street, following at a somewhat greater distance now, his eyes peeled for the crooked shape of Mortimer’s black hat.

  Where the fuck is he going? Caruso asked himself, already tired now, which only suggested that he was no better off than Morty Dodge when it came to staying in shape. He’d thought of exercise, of eating better, both of which he’d considered before. He’d actually bought a stationary bike at one point, then watched helplessly as it became the world’s most expensive clothes rack. He was thirty-six but looked at least five years older, a fact that wasn’t lost on the women he tried to pick up. He knew that they looked at his paunch, his thinning hair, the circles beneath his eyes, and thought to themselves, This guy is fucked. And why shouldn’t they think that? he wondered now. Here he was, a thirty-six-year-old guy, following this weird bastard who was probably going to lead him to yet another weirdo. The worst part was that while he and Mortimer both had to answer to Labriola, Batman didn’t because the Old Man had no idea who he was. But that would change soon, Caruso thought with sudden gleeful satisfaction, as if he’d just found a way to get even with this mystery man he had never met and yet envied for his freedom, and thus wanted to bring down. He smiled. Maybe Mr. Labriola would feel the same way. Maybe he’d think that this fucking guy, this Batman-arrogant asshole, needed to be taught a lesson. Caruso indulged himself in that fantasy, imagining the Old Man’s hand on his shoulder, giving him the Big Assignment. He could even feel Labriola’s lips at his ear, whispering the honored instruction, the one only the most trusted men ever received, Whack Batman.

  STARK

  Stark sat down behind the mahogany desk and reviewed the few details Mortimer had given him when they’d first discussed the job, trying to divine which of them were true.

  The facts themselves were spare.

  A woman had left her husband.

  She’d done so only three days before.

  She’d left from Montauk, Long Island, and gone to an as-yet-unknown place.

  She had not taken her own car.

  Mortimer had offered nothing beyond these scant details save that his “friend” did not wish to reveal himself but promised to supply considerably more information about his wife, at least as far as where she might h
ave gone and by what means she’d gone there.

  In itself, his client’s reluctance to identify himself was not unusual. In such situations people on the other end of the arrangement were often jealous of their privacy. He’d worked for politicians, high-profile businessmen, actors, and musicians. No one was safe from the eternal tendency to fuck up. That was one of the things Stark had learned over the years, that rich, famous, and even quite intelligent people could suddenly find themselves neck deep in trouble. Their personal relationships abruptly spun out of control because they’d screwed the wrong person or trusted some grifter who’d promised five bucks for every nickel they invested. Human life went forward on a sputtering wave of such mindless improvisation. On some otherwise normal day a line drive went foul. A man met a woman, took her to bed, awoke to find a psycho in his arms. Or he let a stranger buy him a drink, talked a little about money, turned over half a million to a thief. There were a thousand ways for a life to go disastrously awry. And when it did you looked for a way out that didn’t blow what was left of you to smithereens. You found someone who could make the necessary correction, have some face time with the face you wanted to wipe out of your life. Oftentimes, the job reduced to simply that, a single eye-to-eye confrontation, one Stark always ended with a standard chilling statement, This is over . . . as of right now. Whatever you thought you were going to get, you’re not going to get it. From this moment on, you only start to lose. How much you lose is up to you.

  He’d delivered these words scores of times, to distraught mistresses and wily con men and well-heeled drug dealers, and the look in his eye and the tone in his voice had rarely failed to do the trick. No matter how venal or stupid or psychopathically greedy people were, they never failed to know when the man they were dealing with couldn’t wait to die. A man who regarded life as nothing more than a long, boring wait at the airport held the ultimate means of intimidation. No one wanted as his enemy a man whose only friend was death.

  Of course, there’d been those few exceptions even to this rule. People who didn’t trust what they glimpsed in Stark’s eyes, didn’t really believe he was what he appeared to be, dismissed his lethal stare as a bluff.

  But Stark never bluffed. That was, he thought, the ultimate secret of success. If you said you’d walk away, you walked away. You said to yourself, I don’t fucking care, and you turned and you didn’t look back. And if you said you would do a thing, you did it no matter what the cost. You said to yourself, I don’t fucking care, and you did it, and it was done, and you never calculated the risk you’d taken, nor ever the size, be it large or small, either of the penalty or of the reward. Not to care what you won or lost, this was the cold, hard ground of dignity, and standing on that ground was the only thing that made life bearable.

  Stark knew that he could convey all of this in a single deadly glance. But he also knew that inevitably some people would fail to read that glance correctly. And so, on those very rare occasions when he’d had some doubt that the point was made, he’d simply ratcheted up the stakes, drawn the nine-millimeter from his jacket, and kindly asked the offending person to open his mouth. The object of Stark’s attention always did so, his eyes widening as Stark pressed the blunt steel barrel into their gaping mouths, careful to scrape the sensitive roof with the metal sight, and thus cause that little nip of pain that so eloquently underlined the desperate nature of the case.

  The problem at the moment, however, was that Stark was no longer sure of what his assignment was. Mortimer had asked for a favor, but reluctantly. He’d never done that before, and it was this odd twist in the road that now chewed at Stark relentlessly, urging him to get to the bottom of Mortimer’s strange behavior.

  But how? He decided he would pretend that he believed Mortimer’s story. He would tell himself that whatever peculiarities he sensed in the deal might well be harmless, and on that assumption he would work in the normal way, using whatever information Mortimer brought him as the springboard for further investigation.

  He took a regional map from the file and spread it across his desk. Since the runaway wife hadn’t taken her own car, the husband would first need to determine if his wife had taken a cab either to her destination or to some other form of transportation. There were several small airports in the vicinity of Montauk. It would not be hard to determine if the woman had used any of them. There were also several bus depots in the area, as well as a single commuter train. The bus or train could have taken her into New York, from which she could have gotten passage to anywhere on earth.

  The trick, then, was to narrow the field, shrink the wide world of possibility into a small, tight knot of likelihood. But that couldn’t be done until the husband supplied the added information he’d promised Mortimer. Until it came, Stark could only wait.

  But waiting was hard, and even as a child Stark had noticed how little patience he had for the undone deed. He liked to be on the hunt, and if he were haunted by anything, dreaded anything, it was the idle time between jobs. During those intervals, he felt his life grow numb. It did not surprise him that soldiers of fortune were prone to suicide. For how could a man who thirsted for danger possibly endure the absence of it, the long days when he felt himself imprisoned in an empty and unlighted room. He knew the usual means by which such men made the clock move. Drugs. Alcohol. Whores. But the drugs wore off, and the alcohol drained away, and the whore finally had to dress and find another john. And after that, the soldier lay in the dull aftermath and dreamed of jungle firefights, the thrill of being cornered, wounded, left for dead, the ecstasy that ever accompanies the narrowest escape. Denied this primal excitement, how banal and uneventful the rest of it must seem. And so why not press the barrel to your head if the hourly alternative offered nothing more than the unbearable pall of the commonplace?

  Stark drew the nine-millimeter from the drawer of his desk, caressed it with affection, thought of Marisol, and marveled with what dreadful accuracy Neruda had hit the mark, understood that in the sickly sweet smell of aftershave the total horror was revealed.

  ABE

  Abe recognized the man who came toward him from the front of the bar as a semi-regular, a guy who came in sporadically, took a place in the darkest corner he could find, and ordered scotch without designating any particular brand. He wore a faded black suit, with shiny pants that fit him badly, and an old hat that looked as if it had been run over by a truck, then pounded back into shape. Over the years, they’d had a few conversations, but Abe had learned little beyond the guy’s first name and the vague notion that he was some kind of investigator, though exactly what type the man had never said, save that he “found people.”

  “How you doing, Morty?” he asked now.

  “Abe,” Mortimer said. He slid onto the stool opposite.

  Abe smiled. “What’ll you have?”

  “Scotch,” Mortimer said.

  Abe usually poured the house brand, a cheap blended scotch that wasn’t all that bad. But Mortimer looked so hangdog, he decided on a better one, grabbed a smooth single malt and poured a shot.

  Mortimer knocked it back quickly, with no sign that he tasted any difference.

  “Another?” Abe asked.

  “Yeah,” Mortimer said.

  Abe poured a second round.

  Mortimer knocked that back, then placed the shot glass on the bar and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  Abe tried to lighten the atmosphere. “You don’t sing by any chance, do you, Morty?”

  “Shit,” Mortimer said glumly.

  Abe poured another round. “Sip this one,” he said. “You might enjoy the taste.”

  Mortimer did as he was told.

  “What do you think?”

  “Good,” Mortimer said.

  “You look a little . . . I don’t know . . .”

  “Fucked,” Mortimer said.

  “Yeah, that’s the word,” Abe said. “What’s the trouble?”

  Mortimer’s eyes suddenly lifted from the glass, and Abe
could see just how deep the trouble was.

  “I got these fucking tests back.” Mortimer looked surprised that the information had flown from his mouth so suddenly. “A death sentence. Three months on the outside.” He rolled the glass slowly between his hands. “Liver’s shot.”

  Abe had no idea what to say, and so he said, “Shit.”

  “Yeah.” Mortimer shrugged. “No hope. Couple months, on the outside.”

  For a moment the two men sat silently. Then Abe said, “I’m really sorry to hear it, Morty.” He poured a fourth round. “On the house. From now on,” he said.

  “From now on,” Mortimer repeated, his voice oddly filled with emotion. “You’re a real friend, Abe. Always there for me.”

  Abe stared at him, astonished that Mortimer could regard him in such a way. Before now he could remember no conversation that hadn’t included the weather.

  Mortimer put out his hand. “My best friend.”

  Abe shook Mortimer’s hand lightly.

  Mortimer smiled at him warmly, then finished off the drink. “I didn’t tell Dottie yet.”

  “Dottie?”

  “My wife.” Mortimer ran his finger around the rim of the empty glass. “I ain’t told nobody but you, Abe.”

  “You should tell your wife,” Abe said, now suddenly aware that this was Mortimer’s best friend talking.

  “The trouble is, I got nothing to leave her.” Mortimer shook his head despondently. “Horses, you know?”

  Abe realized that for Mortimer this amounted to a heartfelt confidence. “So, what are you going to do?” he asked. “I mean . . . about . . . what was your wife’s name?”

  “Dottie.”

  “Yeah, Dottie.”

  Mortimer considered Abe’s question briefly, his eyes gazing into the empty glass as if it were a crystal ball. Then he sat back and lightly slapped the bar with both hands. “I better get going.” He grabbed Abe’s hand and squeezed. “Thanks, Abe,” he said as he eased himself off the stool.