“I didn’t never see him leave. They came to visit him. Then they left. You a cop?”
“I’m with the FBI. Who came to him? What kind of guys?”
“Guys in suits, you know. Like you. Younger maybe. Darker maybe. That’s all. Left, oh, maybe, ten minutes ago.”
“Do me a favor, go get the manager.”
The manager was a geezer in a Hawaiian print shirt so garish it looked like a nuclear nova, hurling gobs of orange light off into the universe. It was quite a shirt for such a scrawny old rat who smelled of bourbon and deodorant.
Nick flashed badge and ID and told the guy to pop the door.
“You got a warrant or anything?”
It amazed him, the lip he had to take. It was television and the movies. Ten years ago it was all, Yes sir, thank you sir, what can we do sir. Now everybody thought the FBI was a bunch of fascists and had an attitude to throw.
“What are you, a lawyer?” Nick asked. “The guy wants to talk to me. Maybe he’s sleeping. Come on, you don’t need a hassle here. Just do me the favor, okay?”
“No, it’s that this guy was a bastard. He insisted on this room. The one next to the Coke machines. It wasn’t even made up yet. But he threw a horror show. So that’s why I didn’t want to come crashing—”
“Just pop the lock, and let me do the talking,” Nick said.
The old guy made a face, and let Nick know how reluctant he was, and Nick realized he was being played for a ten-spot, but he just put his dumb, patient look on, and waited the performance out and finally the man unlocked the door.
The first thing Nick noticed as he stepped inside was the blood. The blood everywhere. On the walls, on the bed, on the mirror, on the ceiling. Classic arterial spatter pattern.
“Aghhhhhhh!” the maid screamed.
“Holy fuck,” said the manager.
“All right,” Nick said, “you two, out. This is a crime scene. You go on in and call eight-eight-five, three-four-three-four and ask for Agent Fencl. You give him the address, tell him it’s a real bad eleven-twenty and that he should get the troops out fast before the city boys get here. Tell him Nick is already here, do you understand?”
The old guy’s eyes were broadcasting Station P.A.N.I.C. but he ran off to do what he was told.
Nick edged into the room. It was a slaughterhouse.
Most of the killing had been done on the bed. It was soaked in blood and there were jet sprays all over the wall above the headboard. Nick thought they’d hit him with axes and from the gore on the walls figured that maybe two or three whackers had gone to it. He could see blood-soaked adhesive tape where they’d splayed him to the bedpost to work on his soft areas with the axes. But Eduardo wasn’t there.
Nick could see a blood trail leading off the room into the bathroom. Jesus, the guy chopped and mangled like that, he had somehow tried to crawl into the bathroom.
Nick could see his bare feet now, pigeon-toed in that loose way that prerigor bodies often have, where there’s no will or dignity, and the limbs just arrange themselves into random patterns as defined by gravity. He walked delicately over to the bathroom doorway and leaned in to look down at the body. He noted a broad but old bare back and sinewy muscles. Eduardo still wore his suit trousers, blood-soaked white linen. The head was skewed to the right and Nick could see the profile of an elegant, perhaps aristocratic face with balding white hair and an aquiline nose. A bondage of electrician’s tape crudely encircling the lower head locked a wad of cotton into his soundless mouth. The visible eye was open wide, in horror, and the face—as did the whole body—seemed almost to be floating on a tide of blood. So much blood.
Nick stared. Why the hell would he crawl in here? Why die on a bathroom floor instead of in a bed? Why roll off the bed and crawl, dragging your guts and lungs and organs into the bathroom? But then he followed the man’s splayed left arm and at the end of his hand Nick saw his finger pointing—no, writing. He’d written something in his own blood on the white linoleum floor.
But as Nick watched in horror, the tide of blood seeped farther out in satiny, blackish splendor from the ravaged body of Señor Eduardo, and it engulfed the word that he had written. Just as it vanished, however, Nick made it out.
It said ROM DO.
The forensics people had been there an hour and the body had finally been carted off and Hap Fencl was still yelling at and being yelled at by a captain of homicide in the New Orleans police department in the never-ending turf war between local and federal agencies, particularly on crimes that seemed initially solvable, when, finally, Nick, down the hall on a pay phone, made contact with Wally Deaver.
Deaver was now head of security for a large pharmaceutical firm in Boston and it had taken the better part of the intervening time for Nick to track him down.
“Walter Deaver.”
“Wally? Hey, Wally, you’ll never guess—”
“Nick Memphis, man, I’d know your merry tone anywhere. How the hell are you? How’s Frenchtown? Gumbo still hot?”
“That it is, old pal. Now listen, there’s a little something that’s come up I wanted to—”
“Nick, you ought to give up the Bureau and join me out here. Jesus, Nick, money, money, money, there’s so much money to be made, it would be great for Myra and you could—”
“Yeah, sounds great, this is no line of work for banking any bucks, that’s for sure, not if you stay straight. Listen, Wally, there’s some old busine—”
“How’s Myra?”
“She’s great,” he lied. “Anyway, you remember just before you left you gave me a list of snitches you said might call. You’d given ’em my number instead of any of the guys in your own outfit because you were so pissed off about policy?”
“Yeah. What, did one of them go sour on you?”
“Boy, did he go sour. Somebody whacked him, but good. He looks like that Panther Battalion got hold of him.” He was referring to the Salvadoran Ranger Unit that had shot up a village and killed almost two hundred women and children, a story that was all over the news a month or so ago when the investigation drew so much attention. “I figure couple of guys worked him over with fire axes. Whacked his action like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Oh, Jesus. He must have crossed the Colombians. Those guys are barbarians. You mess with them and they mess with you right back.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“So which of my bad boys was it?”
“Guy named Eduardo. He tried to call me, but I was out. By the time I tracked him down, they’d totaled him in a sleazoid motel out by the airport. I’m there now.”
“Eduardo?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, yeah, Eduardo,” Wally said unconvincingly.
“I made him to be about fifty-five, maybe sixty, kind of an aristocratic-looking guy. Ring any bells?”
“Yeah. Eduardo Lanzman. But guess what? He’s not a Colombian, he’s a Salvadoran. And the news gets worse. Here’s the punch line. He’s a spook.”
“A spook?”
“Yeah. I met him down there, you remember when Bush had the drug summit in Cartagena? Lots of DEA guys went down, mixed with their opposite numbers as part of the deal. He had it in Colombia, of course, but there were guys there from all over Central-A. So I meet this guy. He was in their National Police Intelligence Section from Salvo. Seemed like a decent guy. So, you know cops, we exchange cards, I tell him if he gets anything hot headed my way, he gives me a call. But someone later said he was an Asset. You know, Agency pork. Agency not as in DEAgency but as in CI Agency.”
“Hey, if he had something, why wouldn’t he call his own team?”
“You never know, Nick, in that world. Maybe it was Panther Battalion that hit him, and didn’t have anything to do with drugs, but was political. That’s a serious league down there; you piss off the wrong guys and the Comanche with the Darkened Windows comes calling at midnight.”
“You did give him my name? I was right on that?”
“If it’s
the same guy, maybe. Just before I left, I went through my Rolodex and sent out a form letter. To all my snitches and contacts.”
“Great. And one more thing. You got any idea what ‘ROM DO’ might mean? His last message. Maybe what he was trying to lay on me. Any idea at all?”
“Doesn’t mean a thing to me, Nick.”
“Okay, thanks, Wally.”
He put the phone down, turning the information over in his head.
“Nick, we got something. His passport.” It was Fencl, calling him from room 58.
“Guy’s name is Eduardo Lachine, of Panama City, Panama. He had a ticket stub from a flight in from Panama this A.M. Plane stopped in Mexico City. As we make it, he came straight here, probably by taxi. According to the hotel, he made one call—”
“To me.”
“Yeah. I guess. And that was it.”
“Are we going through his luggage?”
“That’s just it. There isn’t any luggage. The room clerk said there wasn’t any luggage either. This wasn’t a trip. He came here to see just one person. You.”
“And it killed him,” said Nick.
CHAPTER SIX
The colonel had attitude, that was for certain.
Not a twitch of regret touched his tough face, not a shred of self-doubt. What he got from Bob—furious rectitude, and the concealed threat of violence—he paid back in spades.
“All right, Swagger,” he said. “You’ve seen through us. What do you expect, congratulations? You were supposed to. It’s time to put the cards on the table.”
“Why’d you do that to me? Why’d you set me up to take that shot on myself and poor Donny?”
“They say you don’t trophy-hunt anymore, Swagger. I wanted to let you know that there were still trophies worth hunting.”
They were now in a small, crummy conference room in the trailer that wore the Accutech sign near the three-hundred-yard range. The colonel glared at Bob; the others were some kind of bearded sissy Bob had seen at the range, and the suckass Hatcher. Weirdly, dominating the conference table on which it sat was a large Sony TV with VCR. Were they going to watch a show?
“What is your name, sir?” said Bob.
“It isn’t William Bruce,” said the colonel. “Though there is a Colonel William Bruce and he did win the Congressional and he was supervisor of the Arizona State Police. A fine man. I’m not a fine man. I’m a man who gets things done and I usually don’t have the time to be anything except an asshole, and this is one of those times.”
“I don’t like being lied to. You’d best come clean, or I’m on my way out of here.”
“You’ll sit there until I say so,” said the colonel, fixing those hard, level eyes on him, asserting the weight of rank.
It was a sense of command that he’d seen in some of the best officers, the men who pushed the hardest. It wasn’t inspirational, except by deflection; it was instead a gathering of will, a fury to win or die. It was a gift, too, and without it in battle an army was lost. But Bob had seen its ugliness too—that rigidity that could conceive of no other way but its own, that willingness to spend other men’s lives that came from holding one’s own cheaply but the mission dearly. This guy stunk of duty, and that’s what made him so fucking dangerous.
“We’re after a man,” the colonel said. “He’s a very special man, a very sly man. We think we’re going to get a shot at him. We’re after the Soviet sniper who has hit many great shots in his time, among them the fourteen-hundred-yard job that blew out your hip and the spine shot on Donny Fenn.”
It was amazing, Dr. Dobbler was thinking. His self-control was astonishing. No gasp, no double take, as if it didn’t matter. Swagger simply took it in, and went on, his concentration unmodified, his glare unblinking. No signs of excitation as were common to the species in moments of conflict. No rapid breathing, no facial coloration, no lip-licking, muscular tension. No excitation! No wonder he had been such an extraordinary soldier in battle.
Dobbler wondered how rare this was. Was it as rare, say, as the ability to hit a major league fastball, a gift given to about a hundred babies a year? Or was it extraordinarily rare, such as the ability to hit a major league fastball for an average of .350 or better, which arrives to a baby once in a generation or so? Dobbler knew he’d come across something rare and it gave him a thrill. It scared him, too.
Bob was leaning forward.
“You don’t give a shit about Donny Fenn. There’s only two of us left in the world that remember that young man. And you don’t give a shit about my bad pin.”
“You know what, Swagger? You’re right. I don’t give a shit about Donny Fenn. And I don’t care about your hip. But I care about this Russian. Because he’s back. He’s hunting again.”
Nick put fifty cents in and after a bit, somewhere inside the machine there was a shifting and a clunking, and after another bit, a can of diet Coke rolled down a chute and banged into the bin. He pulled it out, peeled the pop top back and took a long, bracing swig.
“Damn,” said Hap Fencl, “fifty cents. In our building the goddamn things cost seventy-five.”
But Nick didn’t respond.
“I can’t think why a guy would want to be next to a Coke machine,” he finally said. “Hell, two Coke machines, two Pepsi machines, an ice machine, and a machine that drops bags of stale peanuts.” He gestured to the little arsenal of vending equipment clustered in the alcove just outside room 58.
“Maybe the guy had a sweet tooth. Never wanted to be away from the machine.”
“No, it’s the last room you’d take, you got guys dropping quarters or rattling through the ice all night long. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
“Nick, he thought he was being followed maybe. So, he wants a room where there’s a lot of action outside in the hallways, figuring it might scare the hitters off. These guys, though—nothing would have scared them off.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Hey, Nick, you’re not thinking straight. You’ve seen a dozen of these things, not quite so bloody. It’s a straight drug-trade wipeout, the Colombians or the Peruvians or whatever sending the word “out that they are not to be disobeyed or nasty things happen. This guy got caught snitching; went underground; they caught him and whacked his butt good. Okay?”
Nick nodded. Still, it bothered him.
Why me, he thought. Why would this guy call me of all people on the day my wife dies.
He emptied the Coke can in one wet, sweet swig.
“Here he is, Mr. Swagger,” said the colonel. “The man who shot Donny Fenn. And who crippled you.”
Bob looked at the face that the colonel had brought to the television screen with the snap of a remote control. He tried to see some special thing there, something that said shooter, something that said sniper. What he saw was a lean hard face, a face that had no nonsense in it. The eyes were slotted and dark, like gun slits; the cheekbones were streamlined knobs; the hair a tight military sheen. There was a streak of the Orient in him in the slight flare of his cheekbones—he looked like a Mongol.
“Solaratov, T. We think that’s his name. But nobody knows what the T stands for.”
Bob just grunted, because he didn’t know what else was available.
“T. Solaratov, as photographed from quite a distance away by an agent code-named Flowerpot in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1988. Our last picture of him, and our best. He’s fifty-four years old, in peak condition. Runs twelve miles a day. He was in Afghanistan advising Spetsnaz units on sniper deployment. He’s an expert on sniper deployment; he’s hunted men all over the world. Whenever the Soviets needed a shot to be taken, he took it for them. How many men have you killed, Sergeant?”
Bob hated this question. It was nobody’s business; it didn’t matter.
“All right,” said the colonel, “you can be strong and silent. But the official records say eighty-seven and I’d bet you hit lots more. Lots.”
Bob knew what the figure was. He sometimes pretended he didn’t but he
knew, exactly.
“We figure Comrade T. Solaratov has sent over three hundred fifty suckers on to a better world. Head shots, mostly, his trademark. No pussy center-of-body shit for this boy.”
Bob grunted. That was serious shooting.
Nick flashed his ID on the woman and in a few seconds, he was led in to see Mr. Hillary Dwight, vice president, the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of New Orleans, in charge of vending sales. Mr. Dwight was a florid man in a white tropical suit who perhaps drank so much pure Coke that it had affected his ample waistline. But he had a monk’s shrewd, devotional eyes and an office so neat it spoke of a tidy, precision-oriented mind.
“So what is it I can do for you, Mr. Memphis?” he asked. “I hope one of my drivers hasn’t gone and done something wrong. Those boys have access to all sorts of institutions and, frankly, the quality of personnel just isn’t quite what it once was.”
“No, sir,” said Nick. “No, it’s just a little mystery I’m trying to get a handle on. We have a fellow who got himself killed in a motel room out near the airport—”
“Good heavens,” said Dwight.
“But before he got killed, he specifically asked for the room near the Coke machines. You have two Coke machines just outside and Pepsi-Cola has two. There was also a Handy-Candy Dispensing Machine for candy bars and nuts and the like. Now, what are the properties of a Coke machine that might make a man who suspects he’s being trailed by killers seek out their presence? Or am I barking up a wrong tree entirely?”
“Hmmm.” Dwight’s plump face knitted up densely with the process of thought.
“What was the motel?”
Nick told him.
He stood, spun to face a desktop computer terminal and tickety-ticked in some instructions. Nick watched as obediently, in electro-yellow, the program rose before him. The fat man studied it.
“Well now, Mr. Memphis, you see we’re in the process of replacing our Vendo-Dyne 1500 series with the more advanced Vendo-Dyne 1800. You’ve seen them. They talk to you. You can put dollar bills into them and get change. A very sophisticated piece of machinery. And powerful, too.”
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