Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  Even in the air conditioned drugstore, he could feel the sweat under the armpits of his jacket. He was nervous as a bridegroom and, suddenly, very hungry. So he killed two birds with a single stone and laid out the better part of a dollar on two Mounds bars, a cellophane package of peanuts, and a Tootsie Roll. He probably hadn’t had a Tootsie Roll in thirty years.

  The movie house, of course, was closed, and he couldn’t very well stand there in the blaze of daylight on College Avenue picking the lock; but unless the fire ordinances in South Carolina were drastically different from the laws in other parts of the country, there would be at least one, and probably two, rear exits.

  There were, in fact, two, and they were the type where you press down a bar on the inside. Not even so much as a keyhole, but little enough trouble to get open—all it took was a nice stiff plastic credit card and he was in, without making a sound.

  It couldn’t have been any darker. As soon as he was in the theater proper, Guinness struck a match just to get a sense of the layout, and it was a good thing too. The floor plan was nothing remarkable, the usual movie house arrangement of fixed seating with an aisle on either side, but the place itself was a regular minefield.

  Apparently nobody had swept up since the last performance, and every square yard between where he was standing and the main exits in the back was littered with popcorn cartons and empty cardboard cups that looked big enough to hold half a gallon.

  “It’s like a fuckin’ loony bin every night o’ the whole goddamn week, with the noise and the junk they throw at each other.” Willie Trowbridge’s description couldn’t have been too far wide of the mark. Guinness raised his right foot an inch or two from the cement floor and heard the slight crackle of dried chewing gum under the sole of his shoe. A regular monkey cage; it would be some kind of miracle if a person could spend an hour in the place without picking up at least one exotic social disease. What a racket he would have made, stumbling around in here in the pitch black.

  The match flame had burned down almost to his fingers, so he twitched it out and lit another. It took him two more matches and close to as many minutes to make it to the rear of the theater. Once into the lobby, he checked his watch again. Twelve minutes to four.

  Healy obviously wasn’t the cautious type; he hadn’t even bothered to close the door to the stairway leading up to the projection room and, toward the front of the building, his office. As soon as he stepped inside, Guinness could hear the music from a radio tuned to some country and western station. A husky female voice with lots of orchestration to help her out was singing about the pleasures of sexual love; it was so loud that Guinness didn’t even bother to take his gun out—nobody could have heard him, not if he’d been wearing combat boots—until he was directly in front of the office door. It too was standing ajar, if only a few inches, and he pushed it open with the flat of his right hand.

  “I wouldn’t if I were you.”

  The metallic rasp of the Colt’s hammer being drawn back arrested the other man’s sudden attempt to reach for something in the middle drawer of his desk. Healy—at least one assumed it was Healy—kept absolutely still for a moment, looking at the muzzle of Guinness’s automatic with what, under other circumstances, might have been mistaken for curiosity, and then put both of his massive hands, palms down, on the felt blotter in the center of his desktop. Apparently he had been through this exercise once or twice before.

  He was a large man, and probably, twenty years ago, had been quite a lady killer—assuming the sort of lady who goes for thick muscles and lots of curly black hair. Now, however, even though the hair was still in place, a good share of the muscle seemed to have dissolved into fat; there was a general looseness about him as he sat in his chair, his belly crowded against the edge of his desk.

  “You’re McAffee, ain’cha?” he said evenly, perhaps wishing to suggest from the start that he was not the man to be unduly impressed by displays of weaponry. “How’d ya know t’ come here?”

  He was wearing a plaid cotton shirt, with the sleeves rolled up over his blocky forearms. It didn’t look as if it had ever been ironed, which by itself was curious in these days of permanent press. His face also was wrinkled and creased, the flesh puckering here and there around the tanned throat.

  The eyes, however, were at once youthful and cruel. Pale blue and alert, they were the eyes of that most dangerous of all criminals, the arrogant, reasonably intelligent bully, the leader who rules by fear and has in consequence developed a low opinion of other men’s nerve and will, the sort of man Flycatcher would instinctively fasten upon as the useful but untrustworthy lieutenant. The sort of man who, as a matter of preference, would kidnap and eventually murder a nine year old girl, but who might not think through everything necessary to make the thing work, who might not even care—after all, what was a little spilled blood among friends, so long as it wasn’t his? The sort of man it would be difficult to intimidate.

  It occurred to Guinness for the first time that Healy might have put together this little snatch all on his own hook, that Flycatcher might not even know. No wonder the whole business had been so badly botched. He wasn’t dealing with Flycatcher at all, probably not even indirectly, but with a bunch of Grade B bandits overstepping their instructions.

  Damn Flycatcher. God damn the son of a bitch’s eyes. What right did he have to set a thing like this in motion and then just walk off and leave it to this felonious bumpkin to carry forward? He would be furious when he found out, but that didn’t help anybody. It didn’t help Rocky; Flycatcher would have known better than to have pulled a stunt like this, but Flycatcher was off somewhere, probably setting up some other big deal that might work and might not, and could be guaranteed to leave a lot of dead bodies behind either way. Damn him—Guinness promised himself that when the time came, somewhere down this dark road, he would kill the careless, arrogant son of a bitch. He would kill him very slowly, from the ground up. He would teach him just how little safety he had purchased for himself when he had started putting through his schemes by remote control.

  In the meantime, however, Healy wanted to know how the man with the gun had gotten from point A to point B. And Guinness didn’t have any objections to telling him.

  “I have a lot of friends, and they talk a lot.” He smiled, as if remembering some exquisite triumph. “Willie Trowbridge wanted me to be sure and say good bye for him—I think he knew he’d never have the chance.”

  The light shifted in the pale eyes. Nothing else changed, but at least this small town Moriarty would know that he wasn’t dealing with the Boy Scouts.

  Healy smiled too. He started to bring one hand up towards the pocket in his shirt but then thought better of it and let it drop back down to the blotter.

  “So ya’ did that, did ya’? I wutn’t a been too s’prised if ol’ Willie’d busted his neck tryin’ t’ take a bath—but I guess not, huh?”

  Guinness shook his head slowly. “No, I guess not.”

  That seemed to amuse Healy and he laughed, not very nicely.

  “So what c’n I do fer ya, Mr. McAffee? Surely y’ don’t mean ta arres’ me, or y’d be down h’re with a carload o’ cops. An’ y’ wutn’t be shootin’ off ’bout Willie Trowbridge, neither.” In a slow and deliberate motion—this wasn’t a man who was going to get himself shot by accident—he raised his hands from the green felt, letting his elbows come down until they rested on the desktop and knitting his fingers together.

  “Y’ got it in min’ t’ do a deal, mister? I ain’t sure what y’ got t’ trade that’d be worth havin’.”

  Guinness allowed the .45 to line up on the spot between the other man’s eyebrows. He wasn’t smiling now—game time was all over. It would have taken very little to persuade him to pull the trigger.

  “What about you?”

  Healy only rested his forehead against his clasped hands and laughed again. It was the sort of laughter calculated to make you hate the man, and it was beginning to get on Guinness�
�s nerves.

  “You’ll have t’ do better ’n that,” he said, looking up with a contemptuous grin on his face. “I reckon if you could stand t’ kill me, I’d prob’ly already be dead. ’At make sense t’ you?”

  Guinness didn’t answer, he only went over to the window and pulled up the shade. He didn’t even bother about turning his back, assuming that Healy was smart enough to realize there wasn’t a chance in the world of him getting out of his chair—or reaching for what was in that desk drawer—without getting his head blown off. Healy was at least not stupid.

  It was 3:53—two minutes to go, provided Firbank hadn’t had a flat tire or gotten a speeding ticket or something. These split second deals, where so much depended on somebody else not making any little mistakes, were enough to make an old man out of you.

  Outside, on the street, a youngish woman in a pale yellow peasant dress, the kind with little panels of lace edged material all the way down the skirt, came out of the natural foods store, looked around for a few seconds, shading her eyes with the flat of her hand, and then started walking slowly up the sidewalk in the direction of campus. She was carrying a small brown paper bag under her arm, and her hair was a lightish brown and came most of the way down her back. Guinness wondered who she was, and if she had any small children, and if perchance she played the lute. Whatever it was she was carrying in that bag, he hoped she enjoyed it.

  A car came up and parked on the other side of the pavement, and Guinness stepped quickly away from the window.

  “I’ll tell you what does make sense to me,” he answered, almost in a whisper. “It makes sense that you’re going to tell me where you’ve squirreled away the Duelle kid. You’re going to tell me where, and how many of your soldiers you’ve got making sure she doesn’t bite anybody.”

  Nobody in the world could have thought he was joking, certainly not Eric Healy, who owned a house at 83 Belmina Street in Pendleton, and had a son who left his bicycle on the driveway, and went around threatening to blow a little girl away with a high power rifle as she came out of school, not him. The pale eyes narrowed, seeming to measure the possibilities of the thing.

  “’At’s what I’m gonna do, huh?”

  “You guessed it.”

  Healy pushed himself away from the desk a little, leaning back in his chair, which seemed to be one of the old fashioned, swivel kind, and locked his hands behind his head. He was the picture of a man at his ease.

  “Mr. McAffee, sir, you know anythin’ ’bout the man I work f’r?”

  Guinness nodded. “Probably more than you do.”

  “Then y’ know, Mr. McAffee sir, th’t if I let that cat out o’ th’ bag mah life ain’t worth a pound o’ shit.” He smiled briefly, very briefly. “I don’t know if you’d kill me ’r not, but I sure as hell know he would. So if’n you don’t min’, I’ll jes take m’ chances wif you.”

  It was a sensible argument, and if he’d had no other lever to use but the balance of terror between Flycatcher and himself, Guinness would have acknowledged the astuteness of Healy’s analysis by simply blowing his brains out. After all, you can’t make a practice of threatening to kill people unless you’re prepared to do it; that sort of thing is bad for the reputation.

  But Healy knew all that, of course. A man in his line of work probably got threatened with immediate extinction two or three times a month—he was just waiting to see what was coming next.

  Guinness went back up to the window, where he would be clearly visible from the outside, and looked down at the car parked across the street. Almost immediately the door opened on the driver’s side, which was toward him. He stepped back again, leaving plenty of room for Healy.

  “Take a glance out there. Tell me if you see anybody you know.”

  Healy came out of his chair like a freight train—probably this had been what he was most afraid of all along. He braced himself against the window frame with both hands, craning his neck to see.

  Standing behind him, not too close, Guinness was able to peer out through the thin sliver of glass not blocked off by that massive body. And down in the street was Firbank, standing in back of a chunky, rather vacant looking adolescent boy—perhaps twelve years old, perhaps fourteen; there really wasn’t any way of telling—his left hand on the kid’s shoulder. In gruesome pantomime, he brought up the first two fingers of his right hand and pressed them against the boy’s mop of curly black hair and let the thumb drop like the hammer of a revolver. Then both boy and man got back inside the car through the door on the driver’s side, and drove away.

  “Is the message coming in clearly enough, Mr. Healy?”

  Guinness kept his gun trained on the center of the other man’s spine; he hadn’t moved away from the window yet—he looked rather as if he might stand there gazing out onto the street forever—but you could never tell about these things. Sometimes people went a little crazy when you pushed them hard enough in certain ways, even people who should know better.

  “It’s fairly simple, really. Whatever’s done to the little Duelle girl will be done to your son. You saw my friend, and he has his instructions—if he doesn’t hear from me to the contrary by midnight tonight, he’s going to turn your grubby little man child’s face inside out. In a month or so, if you’re lucky, somebody will find him bobbing up and down in the middle of Lake Hartwell, and after they throw up their lunch they’ll phone the sheriff, and the sheriff might think to remember the little Healy boy. God knows, by then nobody will be able to identify him except through his dental records. Tell me, Mr. Healy, have you ever seen a corpse that’s been under water for any length of time?”

  Healy turned from the window now, and his eyes looked as if they had just died in their sockets.

  22

  “Oncet y’ get offa sixteen, it’s jes a dirt road. After ’bout a mile it forks, an’ if y’ foller th’ lef fork you’ll find ’er—maybe three quarter of a mile.”

  Guinness took the right hand fork, however, driving about three hundred yards before pulling the car over onto the shoulder and switching off the ignition. He hadn’t the least intention of simply driving up on them; he would walk the rest of the way, taking his sweet time about it.

  It was 4:40.

  Healy had been extremely explicit about what to expect. After all, now he had a vested interest in Guinness’s success.

  There was one other chair in the narrow little office, and Guinness had seated himself in it, propped his feet up against the front of the desk, and started to open one of the Mounds bars he had carried away from the drugstore. The automatic was back under his coat, since he was no longer worried about Healy. Healy simply wasn’t going to be a problem anymore. He twisted the end off one of the bars and dexterously popped it into his mouth; Healy was still standing in front of the window.

  “You understand the deal?” Guinness wiped his fingers off on the leg of his trousers—when you want to appear capable of the most terrible things, it doesn’t pay to be fastidious. “I get the girl back, you get your son back, and everybody goes home.”

  Healy slumped back against the windowsill, crossing his arms over his chest and shaking his head sadly.

  “It ain’t that simple. I got three guys out ’ere, but they ain’t my guys. They ain’t a chance in hell they’d hand ’er over jes on my say so.”

  He looked out from underneath his eyebrows, silently pleading for a little reasonable appreciation of his dilemma.

  Guinness nodded; it was the sort of thing you ran up against all the time—the subordinate, with the best will in the world, limited in his opportunities for betrayal.

  After all, Flycatcher wasn’t an idiot and wouldn’t employ ready-made organizations with their own independent structures of command and loyalty. He would have done his own recruiting, playing strangers off against each other so that no one could really trust anyone else. Thus, ordering everything, as he customarily did, from a distance, he wouldn’t have to rely on any one single person. It was the only intelligent w
ay to handle mercenaries.

  And even if, as seemed likely, Healy had put together this latest move without consulting the boss, the others would never let him call it off just because his simpleminded kid would get his throat cut if he didn’t. They would know that if the thing fell through, Flycatcher would be indiscriminate in his wrath, and what the hell did they care about Healy’s kid? No, you start a thing like this, but you don’t change your mind.

  “Not to worry,” Guinness said blandly, finishing off the last of his Mounds bar and balling up the wrapper to throw at the wastepaper basket next to the door. “I’m not going to ask you to put your head in a sack—hell, I don’t know what kind of a father you are.” He looked up and smiled. “If you like, I’ll make it part of the deal. There won’t be any survivors.”

  Healy’s answer was a low whistle and a laugh. “Three guys? You gonna take on three guys? An’ all f’r one li’l girl? ’At’s a big risk. What d’ you care about this one li’l girl ’at you take a chance like ’at? They ain’t cream puffs, those guys—y’r gonna get y’r ass shot off.”

  It really wasn’t something Guinness felt much like discussing with this rural desperado. It really wasn’t any of Healy’s business.

  Still, the man had to be made to believe he could pull it off; his smile broadened, until he was showing his teeth.

  “Listen, pal, that’s my line of work. I’ve been pulling the chain on scarier men than you’ve ever seen since I was twenty-three, and the day I can’t push over three little backwoods goons I’ll just quietly pack it up and go spend the rest of my life cultivating daisies. If I tell you not to worry, that means you can go out and buy the funeral wreaths.”

  He’d always hated that sort of thing, sounding like a character out of a $1.35 crime novel (What was Sam Spade’s line?—“The cheaper the punk, the gaudier the patter”), but you’d be surprised how often it worked. If you said you were Jesse James, half the time people believed you. Healy believed him. Healy suddenly took him very seriously.