He eased off the pedal. “So what do I do, Pop?”
“Pull in someplace up ahead.”
Tequila maneuvered the Buick off the road, into the near empty parking lot of an Applebee’s restaurant, and swung into a space. I stepped out of the car and so did Tequila.
“Put your hand in your jacket, like you have a gun,” I told him.
The dark sedan pulled into the lot behind us and slowed to a stop. The windows were tinted dark like the lenses of sunglasses, even the windshield, so there was no way I could see who was driving.
I unzipped the front of my sweatshirt and let it swing open, to show the driver what was strapped to my side.
For a moment the Chevy sat, idling, its engine growling at us. I moved my hand to the butt of the .357. I didn’t want to die in a car crash, but I didn’t want to die like Lawrence Kind, either.
Standing there, squinting across a strip-mall parking lot, in a hopeless showdown with a ton of Detroit steel, I felt old and obsolete, like a cowboy whose frontier had turned into outlet stores and golf courses. If the driver hit the gas, he would flatten me. I wasn’t fast or agile enough to get out of the way, and standing my turf and drawing down on the son of a bitch would be ineffective and ridiculous.
I was going to die, and there was nothing I could do about it.
So I held my ground, one hand on my last, feeble mode of protest, waiting for him to make a move. And then the driver shifted the black sedan into reverse, backed into the street, and drove away.
“Did you see his license plate?” I asked Tequila.
“No, I never saw the back of the car,” he said.
There had been no plate on the front bumper. Missouri required drivers to display a license on the front and back of the car, but Tennessee required one only on the rear.
I wiped sweat from my eyes with the sleeve of Tequila’s sweatshirt as I let out a relieved chuckle. “I have to say, for a minute there, I had this crazy thought that the bastard was Death, come to collect me.”
Tequila shook his head. “I may not have been the best student in Hebrew school, but I’m pretty sure the Grim Reaper doesn’t drive a fucking Chevy Malibu.”
33
Tequila wanted to go back to the hotel.
“You must be soft in the head,” I told him.
We had spent the last several hours driving around and going nowhere in particular, watching for the black Chevy or any other car that might be following us.
“Our bags are still in the room,” he protested.
I didn’t care. “We’ll leave them.”
“My laptop is up there. With all my class notes from school.”
“It will be fine. The hotel people will find it. They can ship it back to you.”
He looked at me with pleading eyes. “Pop, I want to see Yael again.”
I had a feeling this was about her. I sighed. But I guessed he wasn’t the first fellow I’d ever met who’d let his brain go soft over a woman.
“Billy, can’t you see?” I asked him. “She was in on it all along. If that wasn’t her behind the wheel of that Chevy, she was certainly working with the driver.”
“That’s impossible. I didn’t tell her anything about what we were doing here. She didn’t know anything about Ziegler or the bank.”
Tequila didn’t understand. Yael didn’t need to get information on Ziegler or the bank from Tequila. She was working for Avram Silver, and he already knew about everything. He was the one who had dropped the clue that had led us to St. Louis in the first place. I’d been arrogant enough to think I’d goaded Silver into inadvertently making a major admission about Ziegler’s location, but the crafty bastard had let it slip on purpose; he had been running me the whole time.
Silver had the Wiesenthal Center dossier on Ziegler. He’d conducted the original investigation, and he’d already made one failed play for the gold. I knew when I spoke to him that he had designs on the treasure, and he had almost certainly been keeping track of “Henry Winters.”
He must have known about Meadowcrest and the safe deposit box all along. But he had never been able to lay his hands on the box key; he had no pretense to get inside Ziegler’s room. And even if he had been able to get the key, he had no way to persuade the bank to let him into the box.
Silver had used me because an innocuous, enfeebled old man could go lots of places other people could not go without arousing suspicion. An elderly man wouldn’t look out of place visiting a patient in the locked-down dementia ward. An elderly man could pass himself off as Henry Winters to the bank’s employees and get access to the box’s contents. And Avram Silver had found the perfect elderly man, one clever enough to get his hands on the gold, but dumb and confused enough not to realize he was being played.
Now the Israelis no longer had to deal with the problem of getting the key; they no longer had to deal with the problem of accessing the secure vault. The gold was in the completely insecure trunk of a Buick, and the only obstacles remaining between Avram Silver and three million dollars’ worth of gold were a stupid old man and his lovesick grandson.
The Israelis didn’t even need to follow us; they knew where we would be going at every step, even before we knew. They had been here ahead of us, and they had probably been watching us the whole time we were in St. Louis. Maybe Tequila’s girlfriend had been our shadow in the black Chevy. Or maybe she was just keeping track of our movements.
But now she was bait. And if we went back to that hotel, they would spring their trap.
“That’s a bunch of shit,” Tequila insisted. “Yael is not a spy. You don’t know her.”
I grabbed his shoulder and shook him a little. “For God’s sake, Tequila, you met this woman two days ago. Her people will kill us for what we’ve got in the trunk.”
He pushed my arm away. “Don’t jostle me while I’m driving.”
“You’re such a jackass,” I said. But it was me who had been the ass the whole time. And the kid had too much of his father—and, really, too much of his grandmother—in him to get anything other than whatever he wanted. He was behind the wheel, and I would go where he drove.
I sighed. “If we’re going back there, we need to do this my way,” I said.
“What does that entail?”
What it entailed was a reasonable goddamn modicum of caution. We did not want anyone to see our car pulling into the hotel parking lot; our pursuers would certainly be watching for us there. Yael, of course, would be giving them the heads-up anyway, but on the slim chance Tequila was right and she was unaffiliated with Silver, we needed to at least try to slip in and out undetected.
We waited until around dusk to return. It was possible that by that time, anyone staking out the hotel might have decided we weren’t coming back, and the low light would make it harder to spot Tequila on foot.
We circled several blocks around the hotel, looking for our pursuer or for anyone sitting in a parked car, maybe staking the place out. Really, we were looking for pretty much anything that felt wrong.
We didn’t seem to have a tail, and we had seen only one black Chevy in the last couple of hours, but it had clear windows and a Missouri plate on the front bumper. The coast seemed clear.
But as we rolled past the Embassy Suites, it was hard to miss the three St. Louis police cruisers parked in front with their lights flashing.
“What do you think is going on?” Tequila asked.
“Finding out seems like a bad idea,” I said. “Let’s get away from this place.”
“Give me a break,” he said, punching the steering wheel. “It’s probably a drug bust or a robbery. Maybe having the cops around will scare the bad guys off.”
I didn’t like it, but he wasn’t going to be convinced. He was going to make his mistake, and I was going to have to try to deal with it.
Since we obviously couldn’t leave the car with the gold in the trunk, Tequila parked a few blocks from the hotel. He’d go in, grab the bags, say good-bye to Yael, and check u
s out. I’d wait with the engine idling and a hand on my .357.
“Don’t spend too much time with the girl,” I told him. “If we can live long enough to fence this gold and get the money safely into the bank, and you still want her at that point, you can fly her up to New York to visit you. Get in and out of there in a few minutes.”
“It will be fine, Grandpa,” Tequila said as he climbed out of the car. I didn’t really believe him.
I smoked four cigarettes while I waited. As I was lighting a fifth, he came out of the hotel carrying the bags, but he wasn’t alone; another man was walking with him.
I squinted, but with my weak vision, it wasn’t until they got pretty close that I could recognize the second man as Detective Randall Jennings, the murder cop from Memphis, and it wasn’t until the two of them were almost standing next to my window that I realized my grandson was crying.
34
My mind raced, or at least it came as close to racing as it was able. Panic surged through my guts, and that long-dormant cop instinct was coiled around my spine and blaring an alarm inside my skull.
I tried to remember what my doctor told me about paranoia; reached for the notebook to look at it, but my hands were shaking too badly to flip through the pages.
Jennings wouldn’t be here looking for us unless somebody had been murdered. While we were here on our wild goose chase, something must have happened back home.
The detective leaned against the hood of my car, smudging his fingers all over my paint job.
“Why is it that whenever I see you, somebody’s dead, Buck?” he asked.
An image flashed in my mind: hulking, angry Yitzchak Steinblatt walking up Fran’s driveway, carrying a long, serrated knife.
I climbed out of the car and leaned on the door frame, gripping it so hard that my fingers and knuckles turned white. I threw away my cigarette and swallowed hard.
“Tell me what happened,” I said quietly, trying to brace myself for the answer.
“The housekeeper in your hotel found a dead girl this morning, in the bed in room 1116,” Jennings said.
I let my breath out, relieved, as my body sagged against the door.
“Well, most of the dead girl was in the bed,” Jennings clarified. “There was also quite a bit in the sink, though. And some in the toilet.”
Tequila sobbed. Based on his reaction, I assumed the corpse must have been his Israeli girlfriend. That was sad; despite her military training, despite her ideology, despite her lean, hard muscle, Yael ended up a victim just like all those other Jews.
“You look happy to be hearing this news,” said Jennings.
Not happy at all. My detective’s instinct was whispering to me about the cord of Yael’s white headphones tangled up in a pool of congealing blood. It told me about long tan legs sticking out of a shredded, hollowed torso.
“I’m relieved, maybe,” I told Jennings. “When I saw you, I thought you were coming to tell me that something had happened to my wife.”
“Oh, you did?” Jennings asked. “Why’s that? Did y’all kill her too?”
That sounded a little accusatory, and it should have been my signal to stop talking to cops and get myself lawyered up. But all the criminal defense lawyers I knew in Memphis were dead. They wouldn’t have been much help anyway; none of them had liked me.
Tequila dropped the bags on the backseat of the Buick and then collapsed against the driver’s-side door, making wet, snuffling sounds. He wasn’t going to be much use to me right now, but I couldn’t blame him. He had sincerely cared about the dead girl.
I remembered all the times I’d watched victims’ families getting the bad news, and I thought of how Rose reacted when we heard about Brian, and how Yael’s grandmother the Holocaust survivor would respond when she learned what happened at the Embassy Suites.
“What are you doing here, Randall?” I asked.
Jennings spat on the pavement. “I think I asked you first, Buck.”
I squinted at him. “Sightseeing. I figured it was about time I got around to takin’ a gander at that arch they’ve got.”
“Quit bullshitting me, Buck.”
“You’re out of your jurisdiction,” I growled. “That body up there ain’t yours to be asking about.”
“Police are better connected than they used to be,” Jennings said. “Couple of days back, I posted a Twitter, asking if anybody in law enforcement in the greater region knew anything about y’all, and this morning, I got a message on Facebook from a St. Louis cop I know, telling me you’re checked in at a hotel where a murder just happened.”
“You used a bunch of words that don’t mean anything to me,” I told him.
He leaned forward, brushing his fat ass across the side of my Buick. “It means that you two assholes seem to show up around a lot of murders lately, so you’re going to have to explain real fast why I shouldn’t be very suspicious of you.”
He hadn’t told me yet that I had the right to remain silent, but that didn’t mean I had to say anything.
He took my reticence as an opportunity to tell me my connections to these deaths, counting them on his fingers. Lawrence Kind paid a late night visit to my house the night before somebody emptied him out. Several hotel employees saw Tequila going upstairs into this girl’s room the night before she got turned into some kind of science project. Both killings were done with a knife, both corpses were hollowed out and left to bleed. Any cop would be comfortable with the notion that the murders were connected, and Tequila and I were the only common acquaintances between the victims.
“If you were in my shoes, you’d be thinking exactly what I’m thinking, and doing exactly what I’m doing, and you know it,” Jennings said.
I frowned. He was probably right.
“You know my reputation,” I told him. “You’re going to have to trust me when I tell you we didn’t kill anyone.”
He rubbed at his mustache. “Buck, your reputation is as a gunslinger. Damn near every story I ever heard about you ends up with you shooting somebody dead. You have killed more people than anyone I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a lot of people who killed a lot of people.”
“And internal affairs deemed every one of them appropriate,” I said. “My record is spotless.”
Randall Jennings shot me the familiar and distrustful cop sneer I must have used at one time or another on a thousand different suspects. He knew damn well we were withholding information from him, and he wasn’t going to leave us alone until he found out what it was.
“I’d be more inclined to trust you if you’d quit lying to me every time I ask a question,” he said.
“Why don’t you look it up on your Google,” I suggested.
He slapped a hand to his forehead. “Is that what you’re angry about? For fuck’s sake, this is serious now.”
“I was serious then.”
“The St. Louis cops are serious too, and you know as well as I do that they’re looking for any kind of boyfriend this victim’s got. So if you have any information that points another way, this is the time to spill it.”
I lit another cigarette with a shaking hand. “Have they got a time of death?”
“The medical examiner carted the body off only a couple of hours ago, and they won’t confirm it until the full autopsy report. But probably between eight-thirty and ten this morning.”
“It can’t have been us, then,” I told him. “By eight-thirty, we were all the way across town, robbing a bank.”
Tequila’s eyes widened, and he choked in mid-burble, but Jennings just shook his head and fingered his sweaty shirt collar. “Stop giving me shit,” he said.
Tequila and I had breakfast together downstairs around seven in the morning, and then we left, out the front door. I remembered a security camera behind the check-in desk that looked like it covered the lobby and would have recorded us leaving the hotel well before eight. I asked Jennings about it.
“Nobody’s looked at that yet, far as I know,” he said. He leane
d against the hood of the car, and it creaked downward on its shocks.
“I know you don’t believe you can pin this on us, or we’d be having this conversation in an interrogation room,” I told him.
He adjusted his weight, and the Buick shifted with him. “Maybe you’re right, but until I am satisfied that I know everything you know, you’ll be seeing me around. Something stinks here.”
He stepped away from the car, cocked his head a little, and took a few more steps backward.
“Buck?” he asked. “Is it just me, or is your car riding a little low in the back?”
“I think it’s just you,” I said, trying not to let him see a reaction. I looked at Tequila. He was holding his breath.
“You mind popping open your trunk so I can have a look?”
“Can’t do that,” I said. “It’s full of loot from the bank robbery.”
Jennings crossed his arms. “Two people are dead, and I’m trying to catch the killer before he makes another mess. This ain’t a good time to be a wiseass.”
I laughed. “I’ve been around eighty-eight years, Detective, and I’ve found that it’s always a good time to be a wiseass.”
“Why don’t you open up the trunk, Buck.”
I gestured to Tequila to get back in the car. “I don’t think you have any authority to search an automobile in St. Louis, Randall.”
He sighed. “I’m asking you to do me a favor. I don’t understand why you insist on making it difficult for me to conduct a murder investigation.”
“Because you’re still an ass,” I said. “And I still don’t like you.”
“This isn’t over,” he said, pointing an accusing finger at me.
I climbed into the passenger seat and shut the door.
“Let’s get on the highway,” I said to my grandson. “We’ve done about as much damage as we can do here.”
Jennings stood there, hands on his hips, staring us down as we pulled away.
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