The Second Assassin

by The Second Assassin (retail) (epub)

  ‘I wonder if you can help me,’ she asked.

  ‘You want a room?’

  ‘Maybe later. Right now I want information.’

  ‘Like what?’ He frowned and his whole face wrinkled up like a raisin. ‘You’re not a pro, are you? My uncle hates pros coming in here.’

  ‘Do I look like a pro?’

  ‘I don’t know what a pro’s supposed to look like. I don’t think we get a lot here. All I know is my uncle hates them and he owns the hotel and he says don’t let any single woman into the hotel unless she’s got a phoned-in reservation and luggage. You got any luggage?’ Ricky the soda jerk was a Don Juan compared to this kid. He had the personality of an earthworm and a brain to match.

  ‘I’m not a pro, I promise.’

  ‘So what kind of information you want?’

  ‘Information about the guy with the white Dodge in your parking lot.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Is he registered here?’

  The kid smiled. ‘I can’t remember.’

  Jane reached into her bag, took out her wallet and dropped a sawbuck on the counter. The kid swept up the ten-spot and slipped it into the pocket of his red uniform jacket.

  ‘The white Dodge.’

  ‘He’s registered here.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘’Bout an hour ago, little less.’

  ‘Under what name?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’ The kid smiled.

  Jane offered up another ten. ‘Now can you remember?’

  ‘Green.’

  ‘What room?’

  ‘509.’

  ‘That’s the fifth floor?’

  ‘Yup. But he’s not there.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I saw him go into the bar about ten minutes ago and he hasn’t come out so I guess he’s in there.’

  ‘How do I recognise him?’

  ‘Tall, thin, a little on the pale side, like he doesn’t get a lot of sun. Real dark hair.’

  ‘Black hair.’

  ‘Yeah. A bit long.’

  ‘Clean-shaven?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Jane, ‘you’re a peach.’

  ‘You got any more questions, lady? I could use the dough.’

  ‘Maybe later,’ said Jane.

  * * *

  John Bone sat in the end booth of the Henry Hudson Bar and sipped his double shot of ice-free Jameson. Thankfully the bald, white-gloved piano player had taken his leave a half hour before so at least he could drink in peace. Almost eight hours had passed since the incident under the bridge at the World’s Fair and the initial burning pain of the bullets’ impact had dulled to a deep ache now. By morning, when it came time to play out the final act of this game, his muscles would be stiff but not enough to influence his aim. Everything else seemed to be in order as well.

  Bone had heard about Sterling’s development of the DeLisle but somehow Lavan, the late gunsmith, had managed to get his hands on a prototype. The carbine seemed to be based on a Lee-Enfield bolt action but was fitted with an integral silencer all the way along the barrel and was chambered for the U.S. .45 pistol cartridge, itself subsonic. Bone had fired off a dozen shots in Lavan’s basement and it was almost completely soundless. He had also taken care of the matter of transportation. Coming in to Poughkeepsie he’d stopped at a service station to use their toilet facilities and he’d noticed an old Harley-Davidson WJ Sport chain-locked to a pipe behind the station with a cardboard FOR SALE sign hanging on a string from the handlebars. The padlock on the chain would be easy enough to pick and the motorcycle would give him exactly the same kind of advantage the 500cc Dresch had given him in Marseille.

  The Sport was known to be a very quiet machine, which would make his approach to Val Kill safer. Afterward the Harley-Davidson could take him where no motor car could follow. Looking over the maps he saw that he could use back roads to get out of New York State and into Connecticut within twenty minutes with no chance of being followed. He could be in Danbury within an hour and from there it would be a simple thing to take a Greyhound north into Boston. From there he could either sail or fly out of the country without any difficulty.

  Bone caught a hint of movement out of the corner of his eye and looked up from his drink. The restaurant-bar was a long rectangular room set with booths on either wall, tables running down the middle and the bar built against the short wall nearest the door. A small riser and the piano took up the back wall. A woman with a large bag over her shoulder was standing by the door, letting her eyes adjust to the dim light. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties, blonde, wearing a white dress with a blue cardigan. She was startlingly beautiful, her eyes large and intelligent, her cheekbones high and her mouth just a little too wide, which made her all the more attractive. She said something to the man behind the bar, who nodded and disappeared through a door that led back into the kitchen.

  The woman came down the length of the restaurant and stopped at the table directly opposite his booth. She took the bag off her shoulder and dropped down into the chair facing Bone. She let out a long sigh then turned to her bag, rummaging around in it until she came up with a package of Lucky Strikes. Apparently she had no matches or lighter to go with the cigarettes.

  ‘Shit,’ she said. She looked across at Bone and smiled. ‘You wouldn’t happen to have a light, would you?’

  Bone slid out of the booth, took two steps, then reached down and plucked the book of matches out of the spring clip of the metal ashtray on her table. There was one exactly like it in his own booth and at every other booth and table in the restaurant. He opened the book of matches, tore one out, struck it and held the flame towards the woman. She shook out one of her cigarettes and lit it without making the slightest attempt to seem surprised that the matches had been in front of her all the time.

  ‘May I join you?’ Bone asked. The woman certainly wasn’t a prostitute and that made the situation even more interesting to him.

  ‘Sure,’ said the woman. ‘Ships that pass in the night and all that.’ Bone turned away for a moment and retrieved his drink, then came back to her table and sat down. ‘My name’s Jane,’ said the woman. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘John,’ he answered.

  ‘John and Jane, now that’s convenient.’

  ‘Convenient?’

  ‘For ships passing in the night.’

  The barman came out of the kitchen with a sandwich on a tray. He paused to draw a glass of beer from one of his taps then went down to the table. He put both the sandwich and the beer in front of Jane. She took three singles out of her bag and waved away the change. She pinched out her cigarette and left it in the ashtray.

  ‘Egg salad,’ she said, lifting half the sandwich. She took a healthy bite, wiped her lips with a paper napkin and sipped her beer, wondering just what the hell she was doing. She’d called the Plaza and left a message, complete with hotel name and room number. Then, like an idiot, she’d stepped into the bar and sat herself down ten feet away from the man. The trick with the matches was the kind of thing you saw Myrna Loy doing to sucker a suspect in a Thin Man movie. On the other hand, it had worked.

  She saw the man across from her open his mouth to speak and she stopped him with a wave of the hand. ‘You’re about to ask a really dumb question.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘You were about to ask me what a girl like me was doing in a place like this.’

  ‘It had crossed my mind,’ he answered. ‘One doesn’t often meet an attractive woman alone in a bar in Poughkeepsie.’

  Jane smiled and took another sip of beer. There was something just a tiny bit wrong with the way he pronounced Poughkeepsie. There was also something horribly wrong with the things she was finding herself thinking about. He was handsome as hell, in a ghostly sort of way, but it wasn’t so much that as the look in those cold grey eyes of his. Violence and some kind of terrible hunger. It was making her weak in the knees. If she’d been forced to stand u
p at that instant she knew she would have fallen down. She took another bite of sandwich and washed it down with another slug of beer.

  ‘So what is a girl like you doing in a place like this?’ he said.

  ‘I’m a reporter,’ Jane answered. ‘Doing a society piece on their royal personages when they go to church tomorrow. Couldn’t find a hotel room left in Hyde Park, so I came down here.’ It made sense and she could back up the reporter part of it without much trouble. ‘How about you?’

  ‘On holiday,’ he said. ‘Taking in the sights.’

  ‘Been to the fair?’ Jane asked, cursing herself silently the instant the words were out of her mouth. You didn’t play word games with a killer.

  ‘Several times,’ Bone answered.

  ‘Exciting, isn’t it?’

  ‘I found it a little too… enthusiastic,’ he said, looking for the right word.

  Jane took a long swallow of beer, relit her cigarette and forgot about the rest of her sandwich. ‘So what do you do for excitement?’ she said quietly, knowing exactly what she was doing now. She had to see him without his shirt. She saw the night in front of her as clearly as a photograph appearing in the developing tray. Wish me luck, Annie, she thought and sent up a little prayer.

  ‘I meet beautiful women reporters who like egg salad sandwiches and beer and can’t see a book of matches a foot away from them on the table.’

  ‘I’m far-sighted.’

  ‘You’re very lovely,’ he answered.

  ‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’ But of course he didn’t because he didn’t have to. The terrible attraction of a snake about to strike and the looks of a lothario – any woman’s secret dream.

  ‘I don’t meet many girls like you.’

  ‘Like me?’

  ‘You’re not afraid.’

  ‘Of what, you?’

  ‘A stranger in a strange land. Most women would be.’

  ‘Should I be? Afraid, that is?’

  He smiled and in the movement of his lips and the small softening of his eyes Jane saw something of his past, a shadow of his youth. ‘Some women enjoy fear,’ he said at last. ‘It makes life more exciting for them,’

  ‘What makes life exciting for you?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he answered. ‘Excitement can cause you to make mistakes. It’s something to be avoided.’

  ‘Even when it comes to women?’

  ‘Every rule should have one exception.’ He smiled again and she was lost.

  * * *

  They undressed on opposite sides of the bed in his room and for the first time in a long time Jane felt no shyness or embarrassment at revealing her body to a man. He stared at her frankly and she did the same, studying the play of muscles in his arms and chest, the spray of thick dark hair between his nipples and the heavy swelling pulse of his organ as it lifted out of the thicker black hair thatching his groin.

  She stepped out of her panties and laid herself on the pale sheet, her legs falling open like a gift as he covered her, his biceps corded and palms flat just below her armpits, the skin of his wrists just touching her breasts, hard with the ache she felt. She was wet and ready to take him, but even so, it was a shock as he slid into her inch by inch and then began to move in a steady rhythm that seemed to go on forever.

  She lost track of time as he changed his motion and her position beneath him and finally, after some endless length of time, he lifted her legs over his shoulders and began to pound into her almost savagely. At the same time he moved his hands, cupping them under her shoulders in a small, gentle motion that made her hips arch upward and said everything about the man he might once have been and made her think, just for an instant, that perhaps she was wrong.

  But she knew, had known from the instant he’d taken off his shirt and she’d seen the bruises put on him by Thomas Barry – the man she should have felt this way for. The man with Tommy’s mark on him exploded inside her so hugely that she thought he’d torn something inside her, burned her up, destroyed her soul. Even when he was done he stayed hard and in her for a long time, not moving, staring down at her until at last, with exquisite slowness, he withdrew inch by tender inch until he was gone and lay beside her, his breath barely louder with his exertions. She turned half on her side and put her hand flat on his chest and felt no heartbeat.

  ‘It’s true,’ she whispered.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Nothing. Just something someone once said to me.’ He was a ghost, just like Thomas had said. She let her hand lie there for a moment longer and then she roused herself. ‘I’ve got to use the bathroom. Be right back.’

  ‘Don’t you hurry on my account then,’ he answered, his voice in a soft lilt she thought might be the voice he was born with, so much the same as Tommy’s and two such different men. ‘I’ll just smoke one of those cigarettes you have such a hard time lighting.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said, her heart thumping hard. ‘As long as I can borrow your shirt.’ She shivered but not from any cool breeze. ‘It’s a bit chilly in here.’

  ‘Of course.’ He leaned over the side of the bed and brought up the shirt. She shrugged into it then stood and went to her bag and tossed him the Luckys, the book of matches tucked in between the package and the cellophane. He caught the package one-handed and while he worked the matches out and lit his cigarette she crossed the room, hands crossed under her breasts, and opened the bathroom door and shut it behind her.

  Once inside the bathroom she sagged back against the door and struggled hard to keep from sobbing aloud. She’d just made love to a killer and had never been so aroused in her entire life. She’d just betrayed a man she’d begun to fall for and here she was standing half-naked in a bathroom, wondering what in God’s name she should do next. She eased her left hand out from under the shirt and gently put the automatic pistol Pelay had given her on the toilet tank.

  If John, or Mr Green, or whoever he really was had gone looking for her cigarettes on his own he would have found the gun and that would have been the end of it. A bullet to the head, just like Howie. She felt tears forming and wiped them away quickly. She wasn’t crying for poor old Howie. She was crying for herself, baffled by herself, terrified of the man who lay naked on the other side of the door but still feeling the stolen heat from him like a hot coal just below her stomach.

  Jane squeezed her eyes tightly shut and tried to put herself in the man’s mind. If you were a guy who was going off to kill the King and Queen of England the next day you might want to take a woman to bed but you’d probably hire a professional, of which there were undoubtedly a few, even in Poughkeepsie. What would you think when you were given the come-on by a woman at ten o’clock at night in the hotel bar and she told you she was doing an article on the king and queen and had he been to see the New York World’s Fair?

  You might get a little suspicious so what would you do then? You’d go through my bag, you murderous son of a bitch. That’s what you’d do. You’d start going through my bag the minute the bathroom door closed.

  And what would you find? Oh Jesus, you’d find all the names and telephone numbers written down on all those scraps of paper, Howie’s itinerary coming back from Florida and his name, the name of the clerk at the law firm and the name of the law firm itself. Hennessy’s name and rank, Tommy’s name with Scotland Yard scribbled beside it. Doodles of little crowns on stick people and a stick person firing a gun done on a paper napkin from the Claremont.

  Enough to charge, convict, sentence and execute you for being a fool. Stupidly, the only thing she could think of was that her bare feet were cold on the bare white-tile floor and in her reflection, half seen in the medicine cabinet mirror, she had a serious case of what her high school friends used to call bed hair. Then she had a split-second vision of rosettes of blood spreading across the white shirt she was wearing, the spreading stains over the same place where Tommy’s shots had struck before.

  She leaned away from the door and picked up the pistol. Turn the button on the ba
rrel down, pull the side back to insert a shell into the chamber and then squeeze the trigger. Eight shots. She put her ear to the door but she couldn’t hear a thing. She grabbed a towel off the rack beside her and wrapped the gun in it, using her thumb to twist the safety button down. Then with the towel muffling the sound she pulled back the slide, wincing at the heavy click. She put her ear to the door again but still heard nothing. Maybe he hadn’t moved at all and was still lying in bed smoking and staring up at the ceiling with that big, thick cock of his lying across his thigh, waiting for her to come out of the bathroom so they could start all over again. She would look stupid coming out the door in his shirt with a gun pointing at him, saying, ‘Hands up. I’m making a citizen’s arrest!’

  But he wouldn’t be in bed, covered in the street-light glow spilling through the window. He was waiting outside to kill her. Suffocate her with a pillow, strangle her with his belt, a quick snap of her neck with those strong hands. It would be quick and it would be silent and she knew she’d never have the nerve to actually point the stupid gun at him and squeeze the trigger because that’s what cops and killers did and she wasn’t either of those. She was the one in the pictures she sometimes took for Hennessy. She was about to be Howie Raines, lying in a ditch with some cop photographer using a little wooden compass to show which way her head was lying.

  ‘Like hell,’ she whispered. She ground her teeth together, opened the door and stepped out into the room, her right hand bringing up the Walther. The next day, a week, a month, a dozen years later and it was always as though time stood still. She saw her lover at the end of the bed, the sheets littered with the contents of her shoulder bag. He had his trousers on and was leaning over his own suitcase on the little bench at the end of the bed, his hands sliding a fat-barrelled rifle of some kind out of a gun case, working the sliding bolt with a single slap of the ball of his thumb, bringing the weapon up, aiming at her. Just then there was a crash of splintering wood as the door to the room smashed inwards, both Dan Hennessy and Tommy surging through the doorway, guns drawn, but too late because her lover had swung the rifle in his hands around at the first sound of the door opening and was already firing.