by Ian Rankin
“This is a damned big country, Hoffer,” Walkins said at last.
He sounded like he was boasting.
“Yes, sir,” Hoffer replied.
“A man could hide forever in a country this size.”
“Not if someone wants him found.”
“You believe that?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
Walkins stared at him, so Hoffer didn’t dare blink. He felt his eyes getting as watery as Walkins’s. At last the old man pulled himself to his feet and walked to the rail at the end of the deck, leaning on it as he spoke.
“What now?”
“I’ve got a few leads,” Hoffer said, half-believing himself as he spoke.
“A few leads,” Walkins repeated, as though exhausted.
“You might be able to help, sir.”
“Oh? How?”
“Well, I presume you still have friends in positions of seniority?”
“What if I have?”
“Maybe one of them could play with a name. The name’s Don Kline. He was in London, and interested in the D-Man.
He told me he was Agency, but I’m not sure he was. That’s K-l-i-n-e.”
“I can ask around.”
The state Walkins was in, Hoffer doubted he’d recollect the name half an hour after Hoffer had driven away. He wrote it on the back of one of his cards and walked to the table, where he weighed it down with the lid from the ice bucket. Walkins was watching from the corner of his eye. He nodded toward Hoffer as Hoffer went back to his seat. Then he turned from the rail to face the detective, and took a good deep breath. Ah, at last, thought Hoffer: the floor show.
“I want that bastard dead,” said Walkins, “do you hear? I want his ass as cold as a mountaintop, and I want it delivered to me here.” The voice was growing louder, trembling with anger.
Watkins started to move toward Hoffer. “And I don’t want a quick death either, it’s got to be slow . . . slow like cancer, and burning like a fire inside. Do you understand?”
“Loud and clear.” It struck Hoffer, not for the first time, but now with absolute conviction, that Robert Walkins was howl-at-the-moon mad. There were white flecks at the edges of the old man’s lips, and his face was all tics and wriggling demons.
“You’ve got it, sir,” Hoffer said, trying to calm things down.
He was in the employ of a lunatic, but a lunatic who paid the bills and the rent. Besides, rich lunatics were never crazy . . . they were eccentric. Hoffer tried to remember that.
Finally, Walkins seemed to grow tired. He nodded a few times, reached out a hand, and patted Hoffer’s shoulder.
“Good, son, that’s good.” Then he went and sat down again, poured himself another whiskey, and dropped some ice into the glass. He sat back, sipped, and exhaled.
“Now,” he said, “how will you do it?”
It took Hoffer a minute to answer. He was still trying to imagine himself as the Good Son.
TWENTY-ONE
No sightseeing now, just concentrated travel. North on Interstate 27 to Amarillo, then the 287. We were going to be traveling west, back in time, from Mountain to Pacific. But we were heading nowhere but north to begin with. It was more than five hundred miles from Lubbock to Denver. We skirted the peaks to the west of Denver and crossed into Wyoming just south of Cheyenne.
“Tell me again,” said Bel. “Why aren’t we flying?”
“Air travel’s easy to check if you’re someone with the clout of a government agency. Also, it’s easy for them to have airports covered, or car rental facilities at airports. This way, we’re sort of sneaking up on them.”
She nodded, but didn’t look convinced. I could have added that I needed time to think, time to plan, time this drive would give me. The thing was, I didn’t know what we’d do in Seattle. I hadn’t a clear plan of attack. I was praying something would come to me between here and there.
We’d covered more than six hundred miles by early evening.
I’d been thinking about a lot of things. One of them was that it was crazy to arrive at our destination wiped out. Just off the in-terchange we found a motel. Or it found us. We just cruised into the first forecourt of many on the road and booked ourselves a room.
Standing up and walking were strange. My whole body tingled. In my head I was still in the car, still driving. I’d been on automatic for the past hour or so. My left arm was sunburned from leaning on the driver-side sill. Bel had done her share of the driving too, seeming to understand the car better than I did, at least at first. We had our differences about choice of music and choice of stops along the route, but otherwise hadn’t said much really. Oh, at first we chattered away, but then we ran out of things to say. She bought a trashy novel in a service area and read that for a while, before tipping it out of the window onto the shoulder.
“I can’t concentrate,” she explained. “Every time I think I’m managing to block it out, I see it again . . . I see Max.”
She didn’t have to say any more.
At the motel, we each took a bath. We phoned out and had a restaurant deliver ribs and apple pie. We stared at the TV. We drank Coke with lots of ice. And we slept. The beds were too soft, so I swapped mine for the floor. When I woke up in the night, Bel was lying beside me. I listened to her breathing and to the vibration of the traffic outside. Our room held a pale orange glow, like when my parents had left the landing light on and my bedroom door ajar. To keep away the monsters.
How come the monsters would only come at night? What were they, stupid?
In the morning, we ate at another diner. “The coffee gets better out west,” I promised. But Bel took a proffered refill anyway.
We took I-80 west across the continental divide. This was high country, and there were tourists around, slowing us down sometimes. They traveled in state-of-the-art vehicles which were like campers, only they were the length of a bus. And behind they usually towed the family car. They probably saw themselves as descendants of the pioneers, but they were just vacationers. It was hard not to get into conversation with them at stops along the route. But if we did, there were endless questions about Europe. One woman even insisted on capturing us on video. We tried to look lovey and huggy for the camera. It wasn’t easy.
“Maybe drugs would help,” Bel suggested.
“Not in the long run. They’d keep us driving, but they only mask the symptoms, they don’t cure them. We’d end up hospital cases.”
“You’ve been there before?”
I nodded and she smiled. “I keep forgetting how much more worldly than me you are, Michael.”
“Come on, let’s see if we can fill up the cooler.”
We stopped outside Ogden on I-84. Another motel room, another long soak, another diner.
Bel rested her head on the tabletop. “Remind me,” she said,
“which state are we in?”
“Utah, I think. But not for much longer. It’ll be Idaho soon.”
The waitress took our order.
“Are you all right?” she asked Bel.
“I’m fine, thanks, just tired.”
The waitress moved off. “She thinks you’re on drugs,” I told Bel.
“Only adrenaline.”
“This isn’t the best way to see the country. Actually, that’s a lie. This is the only way to see America. We’ll do it properly one day, if you’d like to.”
“I’d love to, Michael.” She rested her head on the table again.
“Say, in a decade or two.”
“I once spent a week in a car going across the country. I slept in that car.”
“You must have felt like shit.”
I smiled at the memory. “I felt very, very alive.”
“Well, I feel half-alive at best, but that’s better than nothing.”
She took a long drink of ice water. “You know, if I hadn’t gone off with you, I mean to London and Scotland . . .”
“I know,” I said.
“Christ, Michael, I’d be dead now.”
There were tears in her eyes. She looked away, staring out of the window, and put her hand to her mouth. The hand was trembling. When I made to touch her, she jumped up from the table and ran outside.
I ran out to join her. Our diner was a truck stop. There was a vast tarmac parking area, with only a couple of trucks at its far-thest edge. Stadium-style lights shone down on us from the lot’s four corners. Our waitress was peering out of the diner window.
Bel was walking in a rough circle, eyes to the ground, and she was wailing. She flapped her arms to keep me away, so I took a few steps back and sat down on the ground. The tarmac was warm to the touch. I sat there with my legs out in front of me, watching the exorcism with little pleasure.
She was saying things, sometimes yelling them. Curses, swearwords, imprecations. Finally she got to her father’s name.
When it came out, it was stretched to the breaking point, like she was tearing it out of her system. She repeated it over and over, then had a coughing fit. The coughing became a dry retch, and she fell over onto her hands and knees. A huge truck was pulling into the lot, air brakes wheezing. The headlights picked out the figure of a crazy woman. The driver made sure to park at a good distance.
Eventually, when Bel was taking deep uneven breaths, I got up and walked over to her and crouched down to put my arm around her.
“Buy you a coffee?” I said.
Next morning we crossed into Idaho. The state license plates all had Famous Potatoes written on them.
“Potatoes?” Bel said.
“Potatoes. These are a proud people.”
We were about eight hundred miles from Seattle. I thought we should get as close as we could then stop for another night, so we’d arrive fresh in the city. Bel wanted to push on. The road really had become her drug. She could hardly relax when we stopped. Even in the motel she fidgeted as she watched TV, her knees pumping. Her diet now comprised hamburgers and milk shakes. Her skin and hair had lost some vitality, and her eyes were dark. All my fault, I kept telling myself. She’d seemed better since last night though, a bit more together. Her voice was hoarse from shouting, and her eyes were red-rimmed. But I didn’t think she was going to fall apart again. She seemed more confident, tougher . . . and she was ready to rock.
“No,” I told her, “we’ll stop somewhere, pamper ourselves, take a little time off.”
Problem was, where did you pamper yourself in the waste-land between Salt Lake City and Seattle? A detour to Portland wouldn’t make sense. The answer started as a sort of joke. We decided to stop at a place called Pasco, for no other reasons than that it was a decent size and Bel’s mother’s maiden name had been Pascoe. But on the road into town, alongside all the other cheap anonymous motels, there was a Love Motel, with heart-shaped water beds, champagne, chocolates, adult movies . . . Our room was like a department-store Santa’s Workshop, done in red vel-vet and satin. There were black sheets on the bed and a single plastic rose on the pillow.
“It’s like being inside a nosebleed,” Bel said, collapsing onto the bed. When it floated beneath her, she managed a laugh, her first in a while. But after a bottle of something that had never been within five hundred kilometers of Champagne, everything looked better. And lying on the bed, as Bel pointed out, was a bit like still being in the car. We didn’t watch much of the porn flick, but we did take a bath together. It was a Jacuzzi, and Bel turned the jets up all the way. We started making love in the bath, but ended on the water bed. We ended up so damp, I thought the bed had sprung a leak. I’d not known Bel so passionate, holding me hard against her like she was drowning. It was the kind of sex you have before dying or going off to war. Maybe we were about to do both.
We fell asleep without any dinner, woke up late, and went to an all-night store, where we bought provisions. We sat on the floor of our room and ate burger buns stuffed with slices of smoked ham, washed down with Coke. Then we made love again and drowsed till morning. We still had more than two hundred miles to go, and decisions to make along the way, such as whether it would be safer to stay in a motel out of town or a big hotel in the center. It made sense to have a central base, but it also made sense not to get caught.
Snow-tipped Mount Rainier was visible in the distance as we took I-90 into the heart of Seattle.
There were things I wanted to tell Bel. I wanted to tell her why I hadn’t cried over Max’s death. I wanted to tell her why I didn’t do what she had done out in that parking lot. I wanted to tell her about bottling things up until you were ready for them.
When I met Kline again, the bottle would smash wide open. But somehow I didn’t find the words. Besides, I couldn’t see how they would help.
It was another hot dry day, and the traffic was slow, but no one seemed to mind too much. They were just happy to be here and not in some other more congested city. The placement and layout of Seattle are quite unique. From the east, we crossed onto Mercer Island and off it again onto the narrow stretch of land which housed the city itself, squeezed between Lake Washington and Puget Sound. We came off the interstate into the heart of the downtown grid system, avenues running north to south, streets east to west. Last time I’d been here, I’d taken a cab from Sea-Tac, which took you through a seemingly un-ending hinterland of sleazy motels, bars, and strip joints advertising 49 Beautiful Women . . . and 1 Ugly One. This was a much better route. There were a few prominent hotels, all outposts of known chains catering mostly to business travelers. The first one we tried had a vacancy, so we took it. It was a relief to garage the car and take our bags up, knowing we now had a base. We’d decided to stay central, since it would cut down traveling time. We checked in as Mr. and Mrs. West, since we’d bought pawnshop rings. Bel flicked through the city information pack while I made a phone call.
I spoke to someone on the news desk.
“Can I speak to Sam Clancy, please.”
“He’s on a sabbatical.”
“That’s not what I’ve read. Look, can you get a message to him?”
There was a pause. “It’s possible.”
“My name’s Mike West and I’m staying in a hotel downtown.
I’d like Sam to contact me. It looks like we’ve been following a similar line of inquiry, only I’ve been working in Scotland, near Oban.” I waited while he took down the details. “That’s O-b-a-n. Tell him Oban, he’ll understand.”
“Are you a journalist?”
“In a way, yes.” I gave him our room number and the telephone number of the hotel. “When can I expect him to get this message?”
“He calls in sometimes, but there’s no routine. Could take a few days.”
“Sooner would be better. All I’m doing here is pacing the floor.”
He said he’d do what he could, and I hung up the phone. Bel was still studying the information pack.
“I’ll tell you what you do in Seattle,” I said. “You go up the Space Needle on a clear day, you visit Pike Place Market any day, and you wander around Pioneer Square.”
“Michael, when you were here before . . . was it business?”
“Strictly pleasure,” I said.
“What sort of pleasure?” She wasn’t looking at me as she spoke.
“Whale-watching,” I said. Now she looked at me.
“Whale-watching?”
“I took a boat up to Vancouver Island and went whale-watching.”
She laughed and shook her head.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, it’s just . . . I don’t know. I mean, you’re so normal in a lot of ways.”
“You mean for a hired killer?”
She had stopped laughing now. “Yes, I suppose I do.”
“I’m still a killer, Bel. It’s what I do best.”
“I know. But after this is over . . .”
“We’ll see.”
The phone rang, and I picked it up. It was Sam Clancy.
“That was quick,” I said.
“I have to be careful, Mr. West. The desk downstairs tells m
e you only checked in twenty minutes ago.”
“That’s right.”
“You’re not losing any time.”
“I don’t think either of us can afford to.”
“So tell me your story.”
He didn’t sound far away at all. He had a soft cultivated accent, which just failed to hide something more nasal and demanding, a New York childhood perhaps. I told him my story, leaving out a few details such as my profession and my true involvement in the whole thing. I said I was a journalist, investigating the murder of one of my colleagues. I told him about Max’s death, and how the gun dealer’s daughter was with me in Seattle. I told him about the Americans we’d met on the road out of Oban, just after a visit to the Disciples of Love. I probably talked for twenty or thirty minutes, and he didn’t interrupt me once.
“So what’s your story?” I said.
“I think you already know most of it. There have been two attempts on my life, neither of them taken very seriously by the police. They couldn’t find any evidence that someone had tampered with my car brakes, but I found a mechanic who showed me how it could be done without leaving any trace. Never buy an Oldsmobile, Mike. Anyway, since Seattle’s finest weren’t going to do anything about it, I thought I would. Then the paper ran my story, and that merely confirmed for the police that I was seeking publicity, nothing more.”
“You think the Disciples were responsible?”
“Well, I asked my ex-wife and it wasn’t her. That doesn’t leave too many enemies. Jesus, it’s not like I wrote The Satanic Verses or anything, all I was doing was asking questions.”
“About funding?”
“That’s right.”
“What did you find?”
“I’m still finding. It’s just not so easy when I have to walk everywhere with my head in a blanket.”
“I could help you.”
“I’ve got people helping me.”
“At your newspaper?”