He swallowed again, nodded, said he was very sorry, to let him know if there was anything he could do, and, head lowered, ear scabbed over some from where I tagged him, he shuffled down the curving walk to his shiny new car and drove away.
I guided her into the house and we sat on a sofa.
I let her cry into my shoulder for a while. She was having a rough time of it. So was her ex-husband, poor old Bob Jordan: first I shoot him and burn his body, and now he up and drowns.
Perhaps fifteen minutes later, she stood. “The girls will be home before long.”
I stood.
She hugged me.
“Oh, Jack. You’ve been so kind.” She swallowed. Looked up at me with those dark blue eyes, shining with tears. “Part of me still loved the bastard, I guess. It’s hard . . . so hard. But then you know all about that.”
I touched the tears on her cheek.
“You know all about losing somebody you love,” she said.
I said nothing.
“I think I’d like to be alone now,” she said. “Try to collect my thoughts before the girls get here.”
I thought that was a good idea. I called a taxi and sat with her till it arrived.
16
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THERE WERE HALF a dozen flights from Chicago to monitor. It was Monday evening, and George Ridge, routed through O’Hare on one of three shuttle airlines, would be on one of them. I could not go down to the gate where he’d be coming in. Doing that would mean crossing the concourse, through security, and the nine-millimeter under my arm—in the shoulder holster, the noise suppressor in my suitcoat pocket to attach if need be—would win me the grand prize if I tried to walk through the metal detector.
I didn’t want to kill him here, anyway. I wanted to talk to him before I sent him on his way. He knew things that I wanted to know.
In the small gift shop I bought a Snickers bar (supper) and a late edition of the Quad City Times. I wasn’t in the mood to read it or anything, but I needed something to hide behind, and I’m just not the sunglasses and fake mustache type. George Ridge and I had, after all, met—back on the deck of my A-frame, when he first approached me to kill Preston Freed. Not only could he easily recognize me, he might even be on the lookout for me; he obviously knew I wasn’t dead: the cover-up he’d arranged for the deaths of Bob Jordan and Jim Crawford indicated he knew just how badly his attempt to kill me had gone awry.
Both Jordan and Crawford had their pictures on the front page of the very Times I held in my hands. I’d seen the pictures in the morning edition, so it came as no surprise to me (nor had it this morning) that Crawford, who had accompanied George Ridge and Angela’s ex-husband on that ill-fated expedition up north, was a certain thin, blond, cadaverous guy. It did come as a surprise to me to learn he’d died in a boating accident. I seemed to remember putting an axe in the back of his fucking head.
I planted myself in a seat in the wide, open area near baggage claim; the airport had a single conveyor belt affair that handled baggage from all flights. Ridge would just about have to come here. And even if he sent some flunky after his luggage, from where I was sitting I could see where the concourse emptied out all returning passengers. He wouldn’t escape me.
My intention, unless he made me, was to follow him. I could have waited at his fancy house—I knew where it was, I’d cased the outside of the place earlier today—but I thought there was a possibility he might make a stop somewhere on his way home to confer with some fellow conspirator. After all, me and the shit had hit the fan while he was (conveniently) out of the country, and tomorrow morning was the press conference-cum-shooting gallery. So tonight, it stood to reason, would be a lively night for George Ridge. Lively for a while, anyway.
In the parking lot I had found the chocolate-brown BMW he had driven to my place; mud no longer coated the license plate, which was Scott County. I touched the car, my hand trembling. I wanted this fucker. I wanted this fucker.
Ridge was large in my thoughts, but he wasn’t alone.
He shared them with the man he’d hired to do the job I turned down.
I had, in fact, spent the day trying to track that man—Stone—without much luck. I felt he had to be in town—I almost sensed he was here, if I believed in that shit—but he had apparently not checked into the Blackhawk. I was dealing with desk clerks on all three shifts and none of them seemed to have seen him.
Having worked with him, I knew he liked to roost close to the site of a hit. It was something we argued about, one of the reasons, really, why I had asked the Broker for somebody else to work with. I’d learned a lot from Stone, he was a good teacher, but he had a serious flaw: I felt he left a trail. He would go so far as to stay in the same hotel as his target and that, I knew, was stupid.
But either he had gotten smart in the intervening years, or he just hadn’t checked in yet. I laid twenties on desk clerks in three other, nearby downtown Davenport hotels, but my description of Stone, and his aliases, rang no bells there, either.
Stone had two other quirks. First, he liked arcade games, was your classic pinball wizard, and he particularly, predictably, enjoyed shooting games. Surveillance over a period of days, even weeks, is tiring, intense work, and I could understand him taking a breather with the mindless challenges presented by an arcade full of games. But he was excessive. In a bar, Stone could park himself at pinball or an electronic ping-pong game for hours.
When I was teamed with Stone, it was before the video-game craze came (and, largely, went). But I had a hunch Stone would have flipped out over Pac Man and Donkey Kong and Galaga and the like. So I spent the afternoon doing what I thought was a clever piece of detective work, checking out several video arcades in Davenport, thinking Stone might be killing time within. But he hadn’t been. So much for my investigative abilities.
Stone’s other quirk? He liked to swim. He would invariably stay at a hotel or motel with a pool, an indoor one this time of year; the relaxation, the soothing, meditative qualities of it were something Stone craved. I had, in fact, picked up the same habit. It wasn’t the only thing Stone had taught me, but in a way it was the most important. Swimming was a constant in my life: in Lake Paradise in the summer months, at the Y in Lake Geneva other months. And like Stone, I would tend to seek out an indoor pool wherever I was staying on a job.
I had swum last night, and today, at the Blackhawk’s pool, relaxing and staking the place out at the same time, my nine-millimeter wrapped in a towel, poolside.
No Stone.
I had also spent some of my time hanging around the non-video arcade below the lobby of the Blackhawk; a shoe shine stand with four seats was unattended and I plopped myself down and watched the world go by. It was a world Stone wasn’t part of.
And I wasn’t surprised, really. Not much by way of recon was necessary on this gig. It would take Stone about five minutes to map it all out, the Bix Beiderbecke Room right next to the steps up to the parking garage, Christ. It was too easy.
By now it was eight-thirty and George Ridge had not been on any of the four flights that arrived so far. The next one would be in at nine-fifteen. I stood and stretched, bones popping in my back. I folded the paper under my arm and walked a bit.
Speaking of video arcades, the airport had its own small one next to the gift shop. I peeked in, and Stone wasn’t there, either. I let out a short laugh at my own expense. As a detective, I made a good hitter. I fed some quarters into several of the machines; there was a Ms. Pac Man that I did pretty well on, but couldn’t make the scoreboard. I checked my watch. Not quite nine. I put some quarters into a game based on the cartoon character Popeye. It was pretty good—Bluto and Olive Oyl were on hand, behaving in character, namely Olive Oyl was a whiney bitch and Bluto was a brutal cheat. I got the hang of it quickly, and on my third quarter made it to the hardest level, a pirate ship. On my f
ourth quarter I made the scoreboard.
Hot damn, I said to myself, as I punched in three letters (all you were allowed): RYN, for Ryan. I was number two on the scoreboard.
Number one was STO.
I stared at it, wondering if it were some guy’s initials or . . . no, it couldn’t be Stone . . . could it?
I went back to my seat and hid behind the Times, waiting, the gun rubbing under my shoulder. People came and went. So did the nine-fifteen flight, which did not get in till nine-thirty. No Ridge.
Shortly before ten something disturbing happened: reporters began showing up. Print guys and TV teams from three stations, with minicams in tow. I began wondering what they were here for, and when the ten o’clock flight arrived, Ridge was on it, and they were on him.
My mouth went dry, seeing him again. The same handsome if slightly heavy-set man who’d come calling at my A-frame, every salt-and-pepper hair in place, though he looked tired, drained, even though he was moving quickly.
He had to. The press was swarming him. Ridge was accompanied by two men, who (like him) were dressed in London Fog raincoats over business suits; nonetheless, they had the rough-around-the-edges look of bodyguards, in other words cut from the same cloth as Jordan and Crawford. The bodyguards went to get the luggage while Ridge cut quickly through the reporters, smiling somberly, answering a few questions but not lingering.
He hadn’t noticed me, which was one small blessing. I hadn’t figured on the reporters. If I’d been thinking I would have known that the Quad Cities was just small enough an area, and Ridge large enough a local celebrity, for the “boating accident” of the day before to have attracted regional media attention. It had already gotten big play in the local papers, after all.
I followed on the heels of the reporters through automatic doors out into the chilly night and watched, with a sick sinking feeling, as Ridge climbed into a chauffeured limo, a sleek black stretch Lincoln. The bastard wasn’t even waiting for his luggage!
Weaving between cars and taxis, I ran across the several lanes that separated the airport from its vast parking lot, hurtled a low cement fence and was soon in the Sunbird, behind several cars in line, waiting to pay the parking fee. I kept an eye on that limo, saw it caught behind some traffic in the exit lane nearby. Another small favor.
I was able to slide in behind the limo at the stoplight, planning to keep at least one car between us for the ride to wherever we were going. Then, oddly, the limo turned almost immediately, wheeling into the airport Howard Johnson’s. We weren’t going far at all. George Ridge lived in a big, Frank Lloyd Wrightish home on the so-called Heights in Davenport, up above where Werner had lived, with a magnificent view of the Mississippi. He had not been home for several days, but rather than retire to his modernistic castle, he was being dropped off at a room at a Howard Johnson’s.
Interesting.
I moved along by, while Ridge got out of the limo, shooing it on its way. He stood there in his London Fog, on the sidewalk by the first-floor rooms on the west side of the motel. He withdrew something from an inside pocket; light glinted off it. Soon he was smoking. Then he put the flat silver cigarette case away. He was watching and waiting. Possibly he was watching to see if any of the media people had followed him.
I had pulled into one of the motel stalls and sat in darkness with the nine-millimeter in my lap. I was down a ways from him, but I could see him. I felt myself tightening like a fist, and made myself relax. It was hard to do. I’ve killed people before, as you may have gathered; and usually with utter dispassion. But George Ridge was someone I would enjoy killing. I was sorry only that I was limited to killing him once.
He was nervous. I hoped that was because he knew I was out here somewhere. He just didn’t know how close. That made me smile. He checked his watch. Then, quickly, he slid open one of the glass doors of the room just behind him and stepped in and slid it shut again.
I thought about that. I knew he wasn’t meeting a woman for an affair in there, at least it was unlikely; he was divorced, although I supposed a married woman might be meeting him here. More likely—much more likely—he was meeting with someone about tomorrow’s press conference. Where he’d cast his vote by way of a bullet delivered by a surrogate, putting an end to the candidacy of Preston Freed. Isn’t democracy grand?
The question was, when to go in? If he was meeting with, say, Stone, and I went in, the shooting could start before any questions got asked and answered. And in the motel setting, I’d have to use the suppressor, and that meant the relative slowness of working the gun’s action by hand after every shot. Well, I’d have to make the best of it.
I was about to get out of the car when a figure walked quickly by, in front of my parked Sunbird, heading in the direction of the room Ridge had slipped into. The man was heavy-set and balding but moved with an athlete’s grace. He was about six feet one and was wearing a long black leather topcoat and black slacks. He looked like something out of an Italian western.
He was Stone.
Older. Less hair, and what there was of it grayed, the widow’s peak a casualty of time; and heavier. Why hadn’t I thought of that? I was heavier myself, although not that much heavier. I had given the hotel desk clerks descriptions of Stone as I had known him perhaps a dozen years ago. I had not allowed for—and, in fairness to myself, could not foresee the exact nature of—the effect of time.
Stone’s hands slid open one sliding door. That meant he was expected: otherwise those doors would be locked. He ducked in there.
I crouched between two cars, nine-millimeter in hand, watching the glass doors, draped, shut, possibly locked now, perhaps ten feet away. I was trying to decide how to go in—the room number was no problem, it was posted above the glass doors, 114—when Stone came back out, moving quickly.
His face was white. Stone was naturally pale, but not that pale; and his eyes were round and wild.
He ran back the way he came, not past where I was now crouching, not seeing me, and moments later I heard a car start up and tires squealed and I glanced back and saw a sporty little cinnamon car—a Dodge, maybe—flash by, and he was gone.
The glass doors were not only unlocked, one remained open, the cold breeze making the blue drape flap like a ghost.
I stepped in quickly, fanning the nine-millimeter around, easing the door shut behind me with a gloved hand. Other than Ridge, the room was empty, but I checked the bathroom, including shower stall, and closet. Nobody there.
Just Ridge.
Ridge, who was on the floor next to the bed on his back, still in his London Fog raincoat, which was appropriate, because his throat was raining blood. He’d been cut from ear to ear, an obscene scarlet grin below the sorrowful frown and empty open eyes of the late George Ridge. The only real estate in his future would be a cemetery plot.
And there’d be no talking to him now; no questions, no answers.
Shit!
I wouldn’t even get to kill the fucker once.
17
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I DOVE INTO the pool, into the deep; no diving board, just off the edge. Sign said NO DIVING but another said NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY, and I’d broken rules before. A nice clean dive, and I stayed under, swam the length of the pool that way and came up in the shallow.
The pool room was steamy, the lighting subdued, the blues and grays of the tile floor and the brown of the brick walls as soothing as the heated pool itself. Skylights above revealed the night; this was a small rectangular room, taken up mostly by the small rectangular pool. It was after eleven now, midnight approached, and I had the place to myself. The glass wall, separating the pool room from the beige-brick parking-garage entry area, was steamed up; but the occasional shapes of people, going to and from their cars, to and from the hotel, could be made barely out, smudgy apparitions haunting the hall.
I swam laps for a w
hile. Very easily. I don’t push myself when I swim. Exercise is not the point for me. Relaxation is. It helps me not to think, when that’s what I want; and it helps me to think, when that’s what I want—the way they used to claim a sensory deprivation tank would bring you in closer touch with yourself. I was in close touch with myself already, thanks, but I did like the way the water and the warmth slowed my thoughts and at the same time brought them clarity.
I had told no one about finding Ridge’s body, having left as quickly as I arrived, apparently unseen. I considered calling Freed, and I would tell him, but now was not the time.
But I had called Angela Jordan, albeit not to tell her about Ridge. I’d apologized for calling so late—ten-thirty is late to make a phone call, anyway in the Midwest it is—and asked her how she was doing.
“Just fair,” she said “The girls . . . especially Kristie . . . are just devastated. Mom’s staying here with me. With us. Thank God for her. It’s been just awful.”
“Have there been arrangements to make?”
“No, not really. Bob’s parents are taking care of everything—there’s a memorial service Wednesday.”
“I didn’t know if I’d catch you at home,” I said. “I kind of thought you might be at the funeral home or something.”
“No. There’s no . . . body, remember?”
Actually, there was a body—partially cremated in my A-frame; by now, no doubt, it was buried in a grave with one of my names on it.
“It’ll be a church service,” she was saying. “I . . don’t get along with Bob’s folks very well. I mean, I’m not the wife, I’m the ex-wife. But the girls aren’t his ex-daughters, so . . . aw, jeez. This has just been a horrible day.”
I was about to make it even worse.
“What if I said I thought your husband’s death was not an accident.”
A stunned silence followed, briefly.
Then, in a somewhat accusatory tone: “What do you mean?”
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