The daughter.
And he knew that the best thing for him to do would be grab her, take her with him and try to work out a trade with Charlie—the girl for Jon and the money. If anyone would know where Charlie was, the daughter would, and if Nolan kidnapped her and worked out a swap, the whole damn problem could be solved in one easy stroke. Nolan wouldn’t even have to kill the old bastard; he could leave that to Charlie’s Family friends.
So it was easy. Just take the girl. Exchange of prisoners. Simple.
But he’d be playing Charlie’s game, doing what Charlie had done to Jon, and that gave him a bad taste in his mouth.
He knocked. A voice from within said, “One moment,” a girl’s voice, medium-range, firm.
She opened the door a crack and peered out at Nolan, looked him over, said, “Oh. You’re a friend of my father’s, I suppose.” She gave out a heavy sigh. “I imagine you want to come in and talk to me.”
“If I could,” Nolan said.
She let him in, with another sigh, as if she’d known he was coming and was resigned to the fact. “Come in,” she said, though he already was, “if you feel you have to.”
Nolan walked over to a worn green couch, sat. The apartment was spare but spotless; the furniture old but service-able. The only concession to luxury was a tiny portable TV that sat in a corner so low that your neck would have to ache no matter where you chose to watch, perhaps as punishment for doing so. The floor was hard varnished wood, scrubbed but too old to shine. The walls were flat, unpebbled plaster, white and very clean; they were bare except for a wooden carved thing over the couch, from some culture Nolan couldn’t conceive of, and three posters, all on the wall directly across from him. One poster had an abstract drawing and the words “War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things,” while the other two showed photographs of starving children, one labeled Biafra, the other Cambodia. It wasn’t the most cheerful apartment Nolan had ever been in.
“Excuse me if I was rude before,” she said. “Would you care for something to drink?”
He shrugged. “Coffee,” he said.
“I have a pot of tea in the kitchen.”
“Fine.”
She wasn’t gone long. She gave him the tea and on the saucer next to the cup was a single cookie, a vanilla Hydrox. Nolan bit the Hydrox in half and a hungry-eyed kid from Biafra caught his attention; the mouthful went down hard.
“I don’t believe this is necessary,” she said. “But I suppose you people mean well doing it.”
She was a girl who might have been pretty, had she a mind to. She was small and had those same dark, close-set eyes her father had, though on her the effect was much different; there was a softness in the eyes that outer layers of strength couldn’t mask. She sat in a straightback chair across from him, right by the Cambodia poster, and crossed her legs, tugging down her long skirt. She wasn’t bad-looking, really, he thought, considering she was Charlie’s kid and dressed like a goddamn nun, black skirt and short-sleeve white blouse, tucked neatly in. Her dark hair probably looked good when it hung loose to her shoulders; right now it was in a tight bun, pulled back from attractive features that had been totally denied make-up.
“I said, I don’t believe this is necessary,” she repeated, “but I suppose you people mean well doing it.”
“Pardon?”
“Believe me, I know this is awkward for you. But I do understand what this is all about. As you must know, when Daddy died, Uncle Harry came down and talked to me, to try to soothe me, calm me. What upset Uncle Harry was I wasn’t upset. I wish he could have understood that as far as I was concerned my father had died long before that stupid crash, and that my brother’s death was of a far greater importance to me, because I had . . . I had hope for Walter. But Walter was . . . stubborn. Stubborn as hell, and he wanted to walk in his father’s footsteps, God alone knows why. So I could accept his death, too.”
Nolan sipped his tea. He felt uncomfortable. He wished he’d thought this out better, planned exactly how he was going to handle the daughter. But who could have planned for a girl like this, anyway? Nothing to do but sit here and let her talk.
“So, as I said, this is entirely unnecessary. I heard the news on the television, and I was saddened for a moment, but I must admit that while Uncle Harry was a nice man in his way, I feel the world will be a better place without him. People like my uncle . . . and my father . . . are destructive, to themselves and to their society. My family had long been a part of organized corruption, our family history is long and illustrious in that regard. My mother’s father, my grandfather, why they write books about him! Famous people played him in the movies, I was a celebrity as a little girl because of it . . . the only kid on the block whose grandpa was on ‘The Untouchables’! No, I won’t miss Uncle Harry, just like I won’t miss my father. You want to know who I miss? Walter, sure, Walt, but mostly, I miss my mother, I wish I could sit and talk to my mother. She was ten years older than Daddy, she was a good woman and always pretended she didn’t realize Daddy married her because she was somebody’s daughter. She was young when she died, in her early sixties, and she died more of neglect than anything else, but she was too much in love with Daddy ever to complain . . . at least she never complained loud enough for me to hear. My whole family was caught up in that other Family, it drained the life out of all of us, and so please tell your people not to come bother me anymore. It’s so ridiculous now, there’s not a close blood relative left and yet still they feel obliged to send you, out of some insane, archaic sense of duty or custom or something. Excuse me. I hope I haven’t offended you. But you must understand. My father was dead long before he was killed in that crash. He was morally dead. My uncle, too. Can you understand that?”
Nolan nodded. He cleared his throat, said, “Uh, you were in the Peace Corps, weren’t you?”
“Yes. Guatemala. I was in the Central American jungle, with very primitive people, who believe in evil spirits and that sort of thing. We built them a school. It was a good experience, but it was as much escape as service, and I realize now that my joining the Peace Corps was somewhat hypocritical. I’m back in college again, taking a degree in English this time, because I want to help where I’m needed most, and where my own moral need is greatest. I hope to teach in the slums, the ghettos. In Chicago, if at all possible. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
He did.
“No,” he said.
“I want to go into the jungle where it’s my father’s kind who are the evil spirits. His kind who need warding off. With education, with patience, with love, maybe a person like me can teach the underfed, the underprivileged, educate them into understanding that hell is what the heroin dealers offer, to realize the absurdity of spending five dollars a day on a game of chance when your family is starving, to know what it is to . . .”
He stopped listening to her. Bleeding-heart liberals gave him a pain in the butt. She was doing her best, he supposed, but she was starting to sound like the naive, condescending child she was.
“I’m sorry Uncle Harry is dead,” she said after a while, “and please thank whoever it was that sent you. But that part of me is gone now. I won’t miss Uncle Harry. I’ll admit . . . I miss my mother. My brother, too. And I miss the father of my childhood.”
“I knew you when you were little,” Nolan said. It was a shot in the dark, untrue, of course. But he tried it.
“You did?”
“I came around to your summer place once. On business.”
She found a smile somewhere and showed it to him. “I won’t lie and say I remember you, but I guess you could’ve seen me when I was a child. I can remember that Daddy was secretive about that place, about Eagle’s Roost.” She grinned, forgetting herself. “He bawled Uncle Harry out one time, bawled him out terrible, for bringing business people around to the lodge . . . I can remember it so clearly. Maybe you were one of the men with Uncle Scarey, uh, Harry that time. Maybe that was the time you saw me.”
“I thi
nk it was,” Nolan said. “I remember how mad your father got.”
“Oh, he could get mad all right, but we had good times at the lakes. My best memories are there, at Eagle’s Roost, we were a family there more than anywhere else. Up so high, away from everything, where we could look down at both those pretty blue lakes. We had a sailboat, a little one, for two people, you know? And Daddy and I would . . .” She stopped. “That was a long time ago.”
“Your lodge was up around Lake Geneva, wasn’t it?”
“Well, the lakes, Twin Lakes, actually, but in that area, yes. It’s kind of a unique place, sort of a shame no one’s using it now, been all shut up for several years. Got the best view in the whole area, up on that hill on that little piece of land between the two lakes. Eagle’s Roost . . . a beautiful place, but just a memory now, one pleasant one I have, anyway.” She got up. “Would you like another cup of tea before you go?”
“Yes, please. Never mind the Hydrox.”
They drank the second cup of tea quickly, in silence.
Finally she said, “Did you wonder about my name, on the mailbox?”
“Not really,” he said.
“I changed it. Legally. I’m not a part of that family anymore. I’d been meaning to change it for years, but always thought I’d be getting married one day, and, well . . .” She touched her hair. “I’ve other things to do for the time being. Do you think it odd, me changing my name?”
“No,” Nolan smiled. “I’ve done it a few times myself.”
He rose, handed her his empty cup and left.
6
It was no problem finding Eagle’s Roost. The narrow strip of land between Lake Mary and Lake Elizabeth had only the one, steep hill. Standing at the bottom and looking up, Nolan thought the hill looked like the Matterhorn, but in reality it was only a hundred some feet, going up at an eighty-degree angle, flattening out level on top. From the foot of the hill all you could see of what was up there was the tall row of pines lining the edge and sheltering the lodge from view, the breeze riffling through their needles. But it was there, Nolan knew, Eagle’s Roost was up there.
Nolan and Angello left the black Chevy a quarter of a mile away, back behind a bend on the blacktop road. Both men were carrying Smith and Wesson .38’s; Angello’s was a Bodyguard model, a five-shot revolver with a two-inch barrel, good for shooting people close up, but not much else; the four-inch barrel on Nolan’s revolver assured far greater accuracy and he didn’t like working with supposed professionals who didn’t observe such simple facts. But he felt he could use some support, so he’d let Angello come along anyway. They circled the bottom of the hill, staying down low, moving carefully through dense foliage like soldiers in a jungle.
It was noon, but the sun overhead was under a cover of clouds, so the heat was modest, tempered by gentle lake winds. The sun would come out now and then, but mostly the day was pleasantly overcast, a day of floating shadows that rolled cool and blue and gray across the green Wisconsin landscape. Nolan could smell the lake in the air and envied, for a moment, the people out boating, skiing, swimming. Then he squeezed the .38 in his hand, as if to reassure the weapon of his intent, and pressed on.
“Fucking bugs,” Angello said, swatting.
Nolan hadn’t noticed them. He pointed, said, “Over there.”
They could see the lake now, as well as smell it. This was Lake Mary and Elizabeth was over on the other side of the steep hill. A combination boathouse and garage, possibly with sleeping rooms on the upper floor, was maybe twenty yards from the bottom of the hill, some hundred yards from the lake front. But what Nolan was pointing to was the driveway extending from the boathouse and cutting through the thick foliage to a big wrought-iron gate that opened onto a road that ran through a subdivision of summerhouses nearby. The big padlocked gate was the most awesome feature of a five-foot brick wall that separated the grounds of Eagle’s Roost (which even from this distance could be seen spelled out backward in wrought-iron on the gate) from those of the subdivision.
“Go back to the car,” Nolan said. “Drive down through that bunch of houses and wait by the gate. If I screw up and Charlie gets away from me somehow, he’s probably going to come tearing out through there.”
Angello nodded. “No other way out?”
“Just those steps we saw on the other side of the hill. If Charlie’s wounded, and I think he is, he won’t be coming down an incline like that. Besides, a car’d have to be waiting to pick him up, and where would that come from?”
“Maybe he’s got people helping him.”
“Risk it.”
“Okay, then. I’m on my way.”
“Angello.”
“Yeah?”
“Family guys are probably going to start showing up, and I’d appreciate you keeping them away, for a while. I want time with Charlie alone.”
“I’ll do my best, Nolan. But it’s not you I work for, remember.”
“Do it for the sake of our friendship.”
A grin split Angello’s chubby face and he said, “Well, since you put it that way . . .” And he trudged off through the high grass and weeds toward the blacktop.
Down in front of the subdivision was a beach, where girls and women sunned, and swimmers, kids mostly, romped close to shore. Out on the lake, sailboats and motorboats of various sizes and shapes skimmed across the water. The cool breeze was soothing, and Nolan could have dropped down into a soft bed of grass and fallen asleep, had this been another time.
But it wasn’t.
He moved toward the boathouse, which was two stories of yellow stucco trimmed with brown wood, Swiss chaletstyle. Wooden stairs on either side met in a balcony that came across the front of the building and faced the lake, but not around the back. Trees and bushes and out-of-hand weeds crowded the boathouse; it had been some good time since a gardener tended these grounds.
He approached slowly, keeping down, pushing through the heavy bushes around the house, keeping under their cover. On his haunches, he moved along the side of the stucco wall, then eased carefully out onto the graveled drive, the balcony overhead shading him as he edged along the garage door. The brown wood of the garage door didn’t quite match the wood trim and stairs and balcony, being more modern than the rest of this twenties vintage building; the door had windows strung across it that allowed Nolan to peek in at the blue Oldsmobile inside. One half of the garage had been meant for boat storage, but no boat was there now, just a dirty, long-discarded tarp that lay slumped across the spot where a boat had once rested. The garage was empty of people and, except for the Olds and the tarp, any sign of human life. Not a rake or a saw or a carjack or a pile of old newspapers, nothing. People didn’t live here anymore.
The garage took up half of the lower floor; next to it was a large games room, dartboard still on the wall, chairs and tables covered, one of them big and round and obviously a poker table, with the back wall taken up by a bar, stocked with nothing. The outside door that led into this room was unlocked, and Nolan went silently in, taking his time, opening the door so that it hardly creaked a bit, even though it surely hadn’t had much use lately.
To the left of the bar area was a stairway. Nolan crossed the room like an Indian and started up the stairs, at the top of which was the light of an open doorway. As he climbed he noticed the tightness of his facial muscles, how tense his neck was, and consciously loosened himself, fanning his .38 out in front of him in a fluid, almost graceful motion. Nolan stepped into the hallway on the balls of his feet. The hall was narrow, three doors on each side, all of them shut tight. One by one he stood before the doors and listened, not opening any of them, only listening, pressing an ear tenderly against the heavy wood, searching for a sound. A dripping faucet behind one door told him he’d found the can, but he heard nothing else until he’d worked his way down both sides of the hall. This final door was to one of the rooms that faced the hill; the rooms on this side were more likely for holding a prisoner than those with views of the lake and a
balcony running by. He listened and then he heard it, a voice, a man’s voice, a young man perhaps.
He stood to the left of the door, back to the wall, and reached across and turned the knob and nudged the door barely open. Then with a quick kick he knocked it open all the way and flattened back against the wall and heard the snick of a silenced gun and watched the slug splinter into the door opposite. Still flat to the wall, he peered around between fully open door and doorjamb, hopefully to fire through the crack into the room at whoever shot at him, and saw Jon standing there, holding an automatic in one trembling hand.
“It’s Nolan,” Nolan said softly, and stepped into the doorway.
“Nolan!”
“Quiet,” he said, walking into the room.
“I could’ve killed you.”
“Well, you didn’t.”
The room had pink wallpaper, a big bed with open springs and sheet-covered furniture. On the bed was a young guy in his early twenties, wearing a blue tee-shirt and white jeans and tied to the bed. One of his feet was bare; this was explained by the sock stuffed in his mouth, as a make-do gag.
“I bet that tastes sweet,” Nolan said. “Charlie’s kid?”
“Charlie’s kid. His name is Walt. God, am I glad to see you, Nolan.”
“Where’d you get the gun and the ropes?”
“From him. Those are the ropes I was tied up with for longer than I’d care to talk about.”
“How long you been in control here?”
“Five minutes maybe. Had a chance earlier, but I blew it. Anyway, he came around a while ago to see if I had to take a piss or anything and I kicked him in the nuts.”
“You’re learning.”
“He’s really a pretty decent guy, for a kidnapper. He was going to help me.”
“Then why’d you feel it necessary to kick his balls in?”
“He kept talking about helping me, but he never got around to doing it.”
“I see. Where’s Charlie?”
“Up on that hill there, I guess. In that house up there. You can see the place from the window.” He walked over to the window and Nolan came along. Jon pointed out and said, “See?”
Two for the Money Page 33