Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  The car stopped. Wherever they were, they were there all by themselves—the only thing you could hear was the wind high up among the treetops, muting even the electrical whining of the cicada.

  Guinness transferred his hold on the trunk lock to his right hand, taking the jack handle in his left. He was twisted around, his knees pressing up against the lid so that it would spring open as soon as Junior inserted his key in the lock. The boy had to be within range. Nothing else would serve.

  Junior was taking his time. He let the car idle for a while before turning off the ignition, and then Guinness could hear him setting the hand brake and reaching over to open the glove compartment—he made the springs under the front seat squeak. But it seemed forever before he opened the door to get out.

  Guinness heard it slam shut. He wasn’t thinking at all now; his mind was emptied. He was nothing except a painfully sensitive instrument for the detection of sound and movement. He could hear Junior’s footfalls against the soft ground. He could almost hear him breathing. He could almost hear his heart beating—no, that was his own heart, pounding like a hammer in his ears. It was a miracle he could hear at all.

  Junior was standing directly in front of the trunk now. He coughed, taking a handkerchief from the pocket of his trousers and then using it to wipe his hands, first one and then the other. He scraped off the soles of his shoes against a stone. He was feeling fine, relaxed and unsuspecting. He couldn’t make a move that Guinness didn’t see in his mind’s eye exactly as if there were nothing between them but air.

  What followed took place in a kind of blur. Had he put the key in the lock? Guinness really didn’t know for sure, and it didn’t matter.

  Guinness released his grip and the trunk lid flew up, and, as soon as he was sure of his target, he struck out with the jack handle as far as he could reach. It caught Junior square across the midsection, and he folded up like a freshly laundered towel, making only that strangled noise that meant the blow had gone home; there wasn’t going to be any second round. Still, Guinness climbed out as quickly as he could, nearly falling down when his knees started to give under him, and he had to catch himself on the rear bumper. Not trusting his legs anymore, he simply fell on the other man, letting the point of his elbow come down into Junior’s solar plexus. Junior wasn’t fighting back. Junior was well beyond that; all he wanted was to remember how to breathe.

  Allowing himself to roll away, Guinness landed on the dirt on his side. He gave himself perhaps three seconds to catch his breath, keeping careful track of everybody’s hands, as Junior groped at digging an imaginary object out of his entrails. Then he set about the methodical business of patting him down. He found Junior’s gun in the right jacket pocket and transferred it to his own left. His gun was stuck in the belt. He lifted the wallet and discovered a small folding knife, not much bigger than a cigar cutter, in with the change in the other jacket pocket. There was nothing else of any particular interest. Guinness laid the wallet and the knife down on the ground and started to check his gun to make sure it hadn’t been tampered with. You never knew what people might have been up to while you had your back turned, and he didn’t want any nasty surprises. The gun was okay. And Guinness picked up the other things again and stood up.

  It was a funny feeling at first, as if suddenly he had become unnaturally tall, and the backs of his knees were killing him. Next time he didn’t think he would let them lock him in any more trunks—you had to draw the line somewhere.

  He picked up the jack handle and threw it into the trunk and then closed the lid. Junior’s car keys were lying on the ground, and he picked them up and dropped them in his pocket. There was a flashlight lying on the front seat; Guinness took that along too.

  Eventually, Junior would get over his dying swan routine and come around, but it would be a while. Getting caught twice in the gut like that takes the lead out of your pencil for a long time. Guinness found a fallen log to sit on, just far enough out of reach to keep anyone from getting any bright ideas, and started going through the wallet, holding the flashlight in his left armpit for a reading lamp.

  There was $153 in cash, along with a couple of credit cards and a driver’s license made out to one Arnold L. Firbank, 827 Ridley Place, Apartment 314, Chevy Chase, Maryland. That didn’t mean much; Guinness himself had all kinds of good pieces of plastic under a phony name. There was nothing easier to come by than convincing identification. There was also a slip of yellow paper, the receipt for the purchase of a pair of trousers for $37.63, including tax. The store was one Guinness knew in downtown Washington—he had tried to find a pair of pajamas there once but hadn’t seen anything he liked—and the date was of three days previous. Guinness frowned as he refolded the receipt and slipped it back inside the wallet.

  Washington. If he came from Washington then he probably wasn’t one of Flycatcher’s boys; Flycatcher seemed to be running true to his pattern and employing local talent for his fetch and carry stuff. Who could tell, there might even really be an Arnold L. Firbank and that might be him lying over by his car, puking up air and trying to imagine what it would be like to have a working set of lungs again.

  “There are wheels within wheels on this one,” was the way Ernie had put it. Was our boy over there one of the interior cogs?

  Washington. Now who did he know in Washington who could have any interest in this particular little situation comedy? Guinness suddenly had the ugly feeling that it wasn’t going to be a very profitable evening after all.

  Arnold was beginning to return to earth. He was breathing as if he hadn’t had a lot of practice lately, but he was breathing. If he could breathe he could talk.

  “Okay, Arnold, you want to let me know what’s going on?”

  Arnold twisted his head around slowly, as if he were having trouble discovering the source of the sound. When he saw Guinness he came to rest, still lying on his belly, his face contorted like a tragic mask and unnaturally dark, which might only have been the effect of the flashlight.

  “You bastard,” he said finally, still almost choking on those three little syllables. Guinness just smiled.

  “Could be, Arnold. You never know about a thing like that.” Guinness transferred the flashlight to his right hand, aiming the beam directly at the other man’s face. Arnold twisted away sharply; in his condition he probably wasn’t in much of a mood for bright lights. “Come on, Arnold; it’s been a long night and I’d like to get to bed before sunrise. Spill.”

  He moved the flashlight slightly, so it would be a little less blinding, and Arnold brought his head back around so they could look at each other. He really was very young. Guinness suddenly felt rather sorry for him, the way sometimes he had felt sorry for the students he had caught cheating on their midterms. It was a tough break to be in this fix when you were only twenty-five or so.

  “Don’t be a sucker, Arnold. It can’t be worth getting killed to you.”

  He was so young, but he moved like an old man, with an old man’s slowness and deliberation, as he set about trying to bring himself up to a sitting posture. When he made it, he wrapped his arms around his legs, probably just to show how harmless he was prepared to be, and he brought his forehead down and rested it on his knees. He was feeling really lousy, and probably it didn’t all have to do with how much his guts were hurting. Finally he laughed; it was a short, ugly sound and in no way suggested that he found anything amusing.

  “Would you have told me?”

  The question was almost a challenge, and Guinness shrugged slightly. The gesture, as invisible as everything else outside the circle of the flashlight beam, hadn’t been any part of the argument. Firbank had asked a real question, of the kind that deserved an answer which was not part of Guinness’s ongoing con job.

  “Sure—why not? You were going to kill me anyway, but if I’d thought telling you would have kept me alive. . . None of us knows any secrets that are that wonderful, Arnold.”

  Guinness continued to sit motionless on his fall
en log, giving the impression that he had lost the thread of what he was saying. Or, perhaps, that the discussion had been adjourned to the inside of his mind. At any rate, it was several seconds before he spoke again.

  “There’s no reason why we have to go to extremes about this thing, you know. You don’t know a thing in this world about me that everybody doesn’t know by now, so why should I kill you if you don’t make me? And what could you tell me that would make it worth your life to conceal? Don’t be a sucker, kid. They only tell you to be strong and silent because they know it isn’t them who’s going to end up on a porcelain slab.”

  Arnold relaxed the embrace in which he held his knees, and one hand stole up to press itself against the side of his head. It didn’t take X-ray eyes to see what was going on inside him; he was probably a reasonably decent type who wouldn’t take the betrayal of a trust all that lightly, and at the same time he didn’t want to wake up tomorrow morning in hell. Only good and decent men ever had such problems—Guinness thanked his lucky stars that he had been born evil.

  Of course, all night the logic of the thing had been evading him, almost until that moment. He had assumed all along that he had been dealing with Flycatcher’s people, and what quality of loyalty could you expect from the sort of muscle you could hire right off the streets of Greenville? Poor little Trowbridge, what had he valued more than the permission to keep on breathing?

  No, none of Flycatcher’s boys would be anguishing through a decision over whether it would be better to speak or to die. But good old Washington, D.C., there was a town where men of conscience—and men with little friends who could check the FBI’s personnel records for them—were practically crawling out of the woodwork. He should have known. He should have known.

  “I’ll make it easy on you, Arnold,” he said finally, letting the flashlight beam trail down until it illuminated nothing except a circle of bare earth about halfway between them, “and you can give your scruples a rest.”

  Guinness shifted uncomfortably on his log, wishing he were back in his bed at the Holiday Inn; it had been a long day, things hadn’t worked out anything like they had been planned, and his face hurt.

  “I have the ugly feeling that we both work for the same masters, although you’d never know it from the way they’ve played this one.”

  Arnold L. Firbank suddenly dropped his hand down from where it had seemed to be holding the side of his head in place, and was all attention.

  It didn’t take very long for them to establish each other’s credibility. Cloak and dagger Washington is actually a very small town where, if everybody doesn’t know everybody else, at least you always find you have friends, or, more likely, enemies, in common. The two of them traded names and security clearances and little morsels of professional gossip until they felt practically like fraternity brothers. It was hard to imagine that only three quarters of an hour earlier each would have been perfectly prepared to kill the other.

  “Anyway, can we get out of here?” Guinness stood up and put his little five shot .38 back inside the waistband of his trousers. In a gesture calculated to look unselfconscious, he took Firbank’s gun out of his pocket and threw it over to him. Firbank caught it and quickly put it away; the truce was firm. “I’m tired of sitting in the dark.”

  They drove back together to the Holiday Inn. Firbank, as it turned out, had a room just around the corner from Guinness’s—where the hell else was there for him to stay?—and he invited Guinness in for a drink from the bottle of Teacher’s scotch he had smuggled down with him in his luggage.

  “I’ve worked this street before, and you have to bear in mind the limitations of these state liquor stores.”

  15

  Even at four fifteen in the morning there was still a light on over the swimming pool, probably just to keep people from falling in if they came back to their rooms after celebrating too hard. And even from a distance you could still see a few mosquitoes swarming tentatively over the water; it really didn’t look very inviting.

  Guinness went back through the interior court from Firbank’s room, thinking to pick up a can of Sprite from the machine under the stairwell to wash the taste of scotch out of his mouth. It always made him feel a little sick to be drinking that late at night.

  He was hungry too, and there wasn’t anything left in any of the bags of junk food he had purchased over the past three days. A Sprite and a little packet of Hydrox cookies and then maybe three hours of sleep; he owed himself at least that much before he had to start thinking about what his next move was going to be. He was fresh out of ideas, but it wasn’t something he was going to worry about just then. Tomorrow morning would be soon enough; he got some of his best flashes at breakfast.

  There weren’t any Hydrox cookies left—there wasn’t anything left, as a matter of fact, except three different kinds of chewing gum and a bag of the sorriest looking cheese crackers he had ever seen in his life. It would be necessary, therefore, to settle for the Sprite all by itself and wait for the morning.

  That was all right, it didn’t matter. He fed thirty-five cents into the soft drink machine and pressed the right button, and when it popped out into its little bin at the bottom, he took the cold can and pressed it gently against his swollen face, thinking perhaps he ought to get some ice to put into a washcloth for a cold compress. By breakfast, probably, he would look like the wrong half of the heavyweight championship of the world.

  But that was all right too. It would probably be a couple of days before Firbank would be able to take a deep breath without thinking that his guts were about to fall out through the hole he was tearing in his abdominal walls. Nothing ever hurt all that bad when you had the satisfaction of knowing that you had given as good as you got.

  Not that he had a thing on earth against Firbank; as of the moment, they were the best of friends. It had all been a terrible misunderstanding, and they both agreed that there was no reason why they couldn’t both pursue their parallel interests in a spirit of cooperation and brotherly concord. Firbank wanted first claim on Holman Duelle and Guinness wanted to pull the chain on Flycatcher. There was no reason why these objectives had to be in conflict, so where was the problem?

  Guinness fished around in his pocket for his room key, smiling unpleasantly. When he had hunted heads for the British it had been drilled into his own as a principle of survival that “our brethren from across the water” were slimy bastards, and the crowd from Langley were the slimiest of the bunch. You simply couldn’t trust people who were under the impression they were saving the world.

  “I thought you clowns were supposed to have a new charter or something,” he had said as Firbank measured out about two fingers of scotch for him into a bathroom glass with too much ice in it—no one under the age of thirty-five could be trusted to understand these matters anymore. “I thought you’d all taken oaths of poverty, chastity, and obedience and weren’t allowed to drop the hammer on helpless citizens.” He grinned and took the glass Firbank offered him. Firbank grinned too; he seemed to think it was awfully funny.

  “We’re not. We’re very moral these days. Your disappearance would have been something we knew nothing about.

  “Actually, I suppose, it’s better the way things worked out. Now we won’t have to make any apologies to your boss.” He raised his drink in salute, as if simultaneously to confirm that there were no hard feelings and that he, Arnold L. Firbank, hero of the Central Intelligence Agency, was a man from whom one could count oneself lucky to have escaped alive.

  Guinness started to say something but then thought better of it and contented himself simply with tasting his scotch. What the hell, if the kid thought his precious director could have gotten him off the hook with a mere apology, then he hadn’t been in the trade long enough to appreciate how close he had come.

  Silly boy. As if Center would have been satisfied with anything less than an eye for an eye—the old man had very primitive notions of justice, and it was standard policy not to let the dea
th of anyone in the Company’s employ pass unavenged. Within a month, Firbank would have been found somewhere with the upper half of his head missing, any public relations problems with the CIA notwithstanding. When Guinness had finally figured out a way of getting away from that car trunk in one piece, it hadn’t been only his own life that he had saved.

  But of all this he spoke not a word. What the hell, let it pass. Six to five Firbank would have thought he was only posturing.

  “Now you don’t have to apologize,” Guinness said finally, putting down his glass on the arm of his chair. “All you have to do is tell me what interest Langley has in Professor Duelle’s recent troubles.”

  Firbank responded by cocking one eyebrow skeptically and shrugging his shoulders. He wasn’t a man to be fooled.

  “Come on, McAffee, you think you’re the only one in the world with a sense of smell? We’ve had our eye on that boy for quite a while now. It was simply a question of deciding which would make us feel better, sending the slime ball up for fifteen to twenty or scoring one off on the other side.” He smiled, holding his hands apart in front of him as if measuring the length of an imaginary fish. “We left it up to him, and apparently prison didn’t have much appeal.”

  . . . . .

  So that was how it had worked itself out. Guinness felt for the light switch just inside the door. Everything was exactly as he had left it, only a couple of hours ago, but he checked the room over anyway, confirming that the complex arrangement of the articles in his suitcase hadn’t been disturbed and that there weren’t any microphone wires leading out from under the chair cushions. No, nothing had been tampered with. Everything was fine.

  He sat down at the foot of his bed and tore the tab loose from his can of Sprite, pitching it contemptuously into the wastepaper basket. It was a damn shame about Duelle. He had rather looked forward to the expression on his face when it seeped through to him that the whole ugly little deception had finally and irrevocably come apart on him.