I stopped and stared at it.
Sonofagun.
If I was going to ship a dishonest politician’s hand to Mortimer Angel, I would stuff it in a box just like that. I might come walking down the sidewalk, whip the collection box open using gloves, drop the package in, keep on going. Two seconds, max. And I would do it at midnight. When a guy is a presidential candidate, all kinds of FBI scrutiny would rain down on the place from which his senatorial body part was shipped. That scrutiny might not zero in as successfully on a box like this as it would at the shipping facility on Jamison Street.
I checked the box under the streetlight. Pickup was at 7:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m., and 7:00 p.m. I read the instructions. For payment, a FedEx account was needed, or a major credit card number on the shipping label. Good to know.
I’d been gone for over an hour by the time I got back. Sarah looked as if she hadn’t moved an inch, except that she was punching numbers into her calculator.
I sat on the other chair at the table and read my novel, best one I’d read all year. Sarah looked at the calculator, wrote down some numbers, then punched a few more buttons. I would never, ever trust a hooker again, no matter how beautiful. The girl might be a nuclear physicist out on the town, letting her hair down. Her IQ might be thirty points higher than mine. I’d thought hookers were fun, if you didn’t take them too seriously. Sarah might think johns were fun, if she didn’t take them too seriously, which she probably wouldn’t find hard to do.
She called it quits a few minutes before midnight. Tossed her pen on the table and stood up, stretched her back and said, “Holy crud, it’s late.”
“Yup. I haven’t seen anyone concentrate like that since Einstein said, ‘Well, Martha, it’s either MC-squared or MC-cubed and I can’t figure out which one. Maybe booze will help.’”
“He never said anything like that.” Sarah took off her T-shirt and tossed it in my lap.
“Sure he did. Guy got confused like all the rest of us.”
“Are you confused?” She rubbed her breasts for a moment, a job I would’ve enjoyed, but I am a rock, I am an island, then she went into the bathroom and closed the door.
“I get that way,” I called out.
“Shouldn’t.” Her voice came back muffled. “I thought we had this pretty much settled.”
“I’m not confused about this room-sharing thing.” I held up the shirt she’d tossed in my lap. “It’s this shirt with this god-awful equation on it, the one with pi on it.”
eiπ+1=0
“E raised to the i pi power plus one equals zero.”
I looked at it. “That’s the one.”
“Euler figured it out. Leonhard Euler, like two hundred fifty years ago. Five of the most famous numbers in all of mathematics, all in one amazing equation.”
“E is a number?”
“That’s the base of natural logarithms.”
“I is a number?”
“Square root of negative one.”
“Is that how they talk on the planet you’re from?”
She came out in a black thong and set neatly folded jeans on a chair a few feet from me, then got into bed. So that was the “like” panties she’d mentioned earlier.
“Question,” I said.
“Shoot.”
“Are thongs classified as underwear or accessories, since they apparently cover fewer than three square inches?”
“I don’t know. You should Google it.” She wiggled a little and set her thong on the night table beside her. “Also, you should turn out the light and get some sleep. It’s late.”
I’m reasonably good at following instructions if they’re simple enough, so I turned out the light, got mostly undressed, climbed into the other bed, fluffed up a pillow, and went right to sleep.
Almost.
“Mort?”
“Yup?”
“When Jeri and I were talking, figuring things out, she said you were in bed three different nights with a really pretty girl, Kayla, showered with her once, and never got laid. Is that true?”
Sonofabitch. “It might be. And thanks for reminding me.”
“Were you ever a Boy Scout? You know, the salute, making fire by rubbing sticks together, the oath and everything?”
“No!” I’d been a Cub Scout for two years, but so what? And what business was it of hers?
“I just wondered,” she said. “Anyway, good night.”
And that’s why it took me an hour to get to sleep.
CHAPTER NINE
WE GOT TO the FedEx shipping center on Jamison Street at nine twenty the next morning. It wasn’t a big facility because Bend isn’t a big place, but it had half a dozen employees—a girl up front and the rest of the crew out back sorting boxes into bins, loading them into vans backed up to a loading dock, getting ready to head out and deliver presents.
Sarah and I went in. She was in her first pi T-shirt, the yellow one. The girl behind the counter, late twenties, looked first at Sarah, then at me, at which time her face lost most of its color.
“I-I shouldn’t talk to you,” she said, looking around to see who might be watching us.
“Oh? Who am I?”
“Mortimer Angel. You got that package, the one sent from here with that guy’s hand in it. I saw you on TV.”
Well, hell. I was going to have to wear that itchy damn wig and moustache after all, like I did in July and August with Jeri. “Mort,” I said. “And why can’t you talk to me?”
“Not just you. I was told I shouldn’t, you know, talk to anyone about it.”
“Shouldn’t, or couldn’t?”
“Well, shouldn’t.” Her eyes shuttled between Sarah and me. “I mean, it was federal agents that said it.”
“But not the SS? They didn’t say ‘Sieg Heil’ and click boot heels before leaving?” Which, of course, we did in the IRS at the end of every closed Monday morning meeting.
“Huh?”
“You shouldn’t talk to anyone—but in fact you can, the First Amendment still being what it is, and pieces of Reinhart not being a legitimate national security issue.”
Her eyes darted toward the door then back to me. “Look, I go on break at ten. I can see you over across the street at the Dunkin’ Donuts for a few minutes, okay? I usually get myself a Colombian in the morning about then. That’s coffee. Keeps me awake in here.”
I looked out the window. A Dunkin’ Donuts was visible a few doors down. “Okay. What’s your name?”
“Cathy.”
“Okay, Cathy. See you there at ten.”
Sarah and I went outside.
“She was scared,” Sarah said.
“Feds, IRS—they’re about the same, except your basic Fed can only scare you shitless. At the IRS, we laugh at shitless. Really bugs us, though, when people die and cut off our percentage.”
We sat in the Audi and kept an eye on the FedEx place.
“Was that true?” Sarah asked. “About Kayla? She was really pretty and willing and you weren’t engaged to anyone at the time, not even going with anyone, and you still didn’t get laid?”
“Don’t want to talk about it, kiddo.”
“So it’s true.”
“No comment.”
“That’s almost sad. Except . . .”
“Except what?” I said, falling for it.
“Except it explains why Jeri trusts you so much. You must have a conscience or something like a big dense block of iron.”
“Iron is dense by definition. It’s redundant to say so.”
“A salient point for sure, but the prosecution still rests.”
“We could go get a donut. I’ll buy.”
“You get one. I’ll watch you bloat up.”
Which we did, although I didn’t bloat up. Much. And at 10:01 Cathy came in. At 9:59 I’d ordered a Colombian to speed things up. I handed it to her as she came in the door.
At a table in back she said, “You’re really famous.”
“Yup,” I said, false modesty not being my
style.
“Wow. I never thought . . . I mean, this’s really cool. But I can’t stay very long, so—what did you want to know?” She sipped her coffee and looked at me over the rim of the cup.
“Who shipped the hand?”
“Well, that’s what everyone wants to know, obviously.”
“Obviously, but do you remember what the person looked like who came in with it?”
“It came from a drop box. No one saw who put it in there.”
Exactly what I’d thought last night—but what else would one expect of a gumshoe of my caliber?
“So the Feds drew a blank?” I said.
“Guess so. No one here knows anything at all. It’s not like we open packages before we ship them. Everything gets sent through a scanner for weapons and explosives, but that’s about it.”
“Wouldn’t pick up flesh and bone, huh?”
“Nope. Obviously, since it didn’t.”
Second time she’d used that word, putting bullet holes in my gravitas.
“Packages in a drop box are paid by a FedEx account or credit card, is that right?” I asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“Which was it?”
“Credit card. Visa. We mark out the number with special ink after we run it and it clears, so it doesn’t get sent all over where people can see it.”
“Do you know who the card belonged to? Do you get that?”
“Nope. I ran it. To me it was just a number. I bet those agents know, though. They could’ve backtracked it off the shipping number from our computer system at corporate.”
If they got anywhere with that, they would’ve already swooped down on the guy and it would be all over the news. J. Edgar’s boys would be crowing like roosters if they’d caught him, so that name had no doubt sent them straight into a brick wall.
“How many drop boxes are there in this town?”
“Just one. It’s on the main street, south of here.”
“I saw it. Do you know when the box was unloaded? I mean, when it had that package in it?”
“It was the morning drop, the seven o’clock. We got that off the label—the time we processed it through.”
Worst time possible, since the package could have been put in the box at midnight or two in the morning. Just the way I’d do it.
“Anything else?” Cathy asked. “I gotta get back.”
I couldn’t think of anything more. “Nope. Thanks for talking to us.”
“Yeah, just don’t tell anyone I said anything.”
“Our secret.”
She left.
Sarah and I went out to her car. “Now what?” she said. “Can we please start looking for Allie again?”
“One last thing, then we’ll head back to Gerlach and get on that.”
“What’s that?”
“I gotta look at that drop box again. I saw it last night. Mile or so south of our motel.”
The box was still there. Good thing, too, because if it wasn’t, tracking it down would’ve been a bitch.
I stood on the sidewalk wearing the dirty-blond wig, hair half over my ears, no dumbass moustache, and looked around. A bunch of stores were nearby: Ace Hardware, variety, a real estate office, sewing machine sales and service. But at a diagonal across the street, I saw a two-story house with a few missing composition shingles, a gutter in need of repair, three buckled wooden steps leading up to a deep, screened-in porch.
Sarah and I went over. She was trying not to laugh at my wig, and I was trying not to deck her. The porch was in shadow, but close up I could see an elderly man sitting in a glider, staring at the street. An old dog was lying at his feet, asleep.
I went up two steps and rapped on a post holding up the porch roof. The dog twisted its head and looked at me, didn’t move otherwise.
“Hep you?” the old guy asked through a screen door. He looked to be in his seventies. He had bushy white eyebrows and needed a shave. His chest was sunken and he had on baggy jeans, a flannel shirt, and bright red suspenders.
“I was wondering about that FedEx drop box over there.”
“Lot of folks wonderin’ ’bout that box these days.”
“Oh?”
“Federal guys. FBI. The hand of that sonofabitchin’ liar was sent from there.”
“Well, you got his character right.”
“No big trick. They’s all goddamn liars. Career sons of bitches lookin’ out for number one. My name’s Fred, in case you want to know who you’re speakin’ with. You oughta come on in so we kin talk proper-like, ’specially since you ain’t alone.”
I opened the door and Sarah and I went onto the porch. Fred sized us up, especially Sarah. Old fellow had a good eye. Hope I end up like him.
“Nice to meet you, Fred. I’m Earl. I got a few questions, if you don’t mind. Do you see people put packages in that box?”
“Sure do, all day long. What you wanna ask is, did I see who dropped off the package with that liar’s hand in it.”
“That’s the question.”
“Answer’s no, same thing I told the Feds. How the hell would I know who put it in there? I see twenty, thirty people a day drop stuff off. None of ’em mean a toot or a whistle to me.” He leaned forward and looked at Sarah. “You’re an almighty pretty girl. What’s your name, hon?”
“Sarah.”
“Sarah. That’s a lovely name. First girl I ever kissed was named Sarah. This here gent with you’s one hell of a lucky man, I’ll tell you what.”
“He’s never kissed me. How lucky is that?”
“Well, then he’s a blamed fool.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“Earl,” Fred said. “You’re a blamed fool, ain’t cha?”
“Most of the time. So those Feds didn’t learn a thing from you?”
“Fact is, they did. I told ’em Reinhart was a lying son of a bitch and got what he deserved, so you betcha they learned a thing or three. They learned that Fred Meyer ain’t no fool. Not like them anyways, since they took my fingerprints. Tole ’em I’ve never in my life touched that box over there, and I didn’t kill that lying son of a bitch and ship off his hand, either, but you know Feds.”
I didn’t know what else to ask. Fred didn’t know anything. I was about to turn away when I remembered our search for Allie and the million-dollar question popped out: “I don’t suppose you’ve seen a green Mercedes SUV around here, have you?”
He looked off in the distance for a moment, then said, “Fact is, I have. Huh. Fact is, an SUV like that—green, too—stopped at that box a few days back and dropped off a package. Damn funny, you askin’ that. You don’t see a lot of SUVs like that around here. Worth more than my house here, if’n I wanted to sell it.”
My heart rate went up a few beats per minute. “Did you see who put the package in?”
He thought about that. “A girl. Not old. Pretty, too. I remember ’cause I still like pretty girls. I ain’t so old yet that that don’t matter to me. I sit out here and every so often a pretty one’ll come by.”
“Was she driving?”
“Uh-uh. A woman was. Older, but also good-looking, near as I could tell. It was gettin’ on toward dusk so the light wasn’t so good, but I got new glasses a couple months back so my eyes is fair.” He gave Sarah and me a sheepish look. “And, a while back I bought me these at Cabela’s.” He held up a pair of field glasses. “Good ones, too. Cost five hundred bucks, but worth it. If I see what might be a pretty girl on the street out there, I pick these up and get me a better look.”
I showed him a picture of Allie. “Did she look like this?”
He stared at the photo for five seconds. “This one’s blond. Girl that put that package in the box had dark hair.”
“What if she was wearing a wig?”
“A wig, huh?” He studied the picture a while longer. “The light was starting to go, but, yeah, I’d say fifty-fifty, that’s her.”
“So, flip a coin?”
“About that. Heads it’s her, ta
ils it’s someone looks close.”
“How long ago did you see them?”
He thought about it for nearly half a minute. “Been four days, maybe five.”
“Feds didn’t mention them?”
“Can’t figure why they’d have a reason to. Damn strange, you askin’.” He gave Sarah a questioning look.
“He’s like that,” she said. “It’s exhausting.”
He stared at her shirt. “Biggest piece of pi is three.” He chortled. “That’s a good one. Oughta get me a shirt like that, piss off my brother.”
Sarah and I walked back to her car.
A pretty girl that might have been Allie, and a good-looking woman in a green Mercedes SUV. About the right number of days ago, they’d put a package in that drop box. Jesus H. Christ. I’d made a connection so unreal it was like being in the Twilight Zone. Next person over the horizon would be Rod Serling.
“That’s just . . . impossible,” Sarah said as I parked the Audi at the Slumberland, a final pit stop before we headed back to Gerlach. “Allie couldn’t be mixed up in that mess.”
I didn’t know what to tell her. Allie had phoned from Gerlach. A green SUV was seen in Gerlach about that time with a girl who might have been Allie inside and a woman driving. A girl in a green SUV had dropped off a package in the same box Reinhart’s hand had been put in, with a woman driving. The whole thing might be nothing but coincidence and coincidences happen, but I had the eerie feeling it was all tied together somehow. I also had the feeling that the FBI wasn’t anywhere near it.
I could’ve been wrong on all counts since that’s part of my MO, but it was still eerie as hell.
Up in the room I looked around. I didn’t see anything we’d left behind. Sarah had extra clothing and school things in her duffel bag. She came out of the bathroom in jeans and her pi shirt. “I’m ready,” she said. Her tone was distracted. The possibility that her sister was somehow tied up with the Reinhart thing had her brain spinning.
By ten forty we were out of Bend and on the highway, headed south through low scrubby hills covered with pine.
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