Dead and Gone (10 page)

M
ax got back from Mama’s, came upstairs to my room, signed “telephone.” Then tapped his heart, pointed at me.

I shrugged a “Huh?” back at him.

He made the gesture for “Wolfe.”

I
called at eleven, like she’d left word to.

“It’s me.”

“Immigration has them still at that address.”

“Illinois?”

“Yes.”

“Could it just be lag-time in getting the records updated?”

“It could be,” Wolfe said softly, “if I were relying on their records.”

I got the message. “Last contact?” I asked. “Almost a year ago. They made an application to sponsor a relative.”

“I’m missing a piece. More than one.”

“We’ve got someone out there.”

“INS?”

“Chicago PD.”

“You said … Never mind. He’s
with
you? Or just someone who can be worked with?”

“The former. And you and he have mutual interests, anyway.”

“How could that be?”

“He wants the missing kid,” Wolfe said.

E
ven if the DEA wasn’t lurking around every big-city airport, fitting passengers into their lame “profiles,” everyone on my side of the line knows better than to buy a ticket with cash. That one’s a guaranteed red flag. They want photo ID now, too, so slipping through the cracks isn’t as easy as it used to be.

I didn’t know how far my new face would take me. Didn’t know if they had an alert out. My old mug shots wouldn’t match up. I knew they’d photographed me in the hospital more than once, but never without the bandages. Still, the two Bronx detectives had seen the new face enough times so a police sketch artist could probably get pretty close.

It had been a long time. Happened in late August; now it was the tail end of January. Wolfe said there were no wants-and-warrants out on me. But that didn’t mean they weren’t looking—you don’t need a warrant to bring someone in for “questioning,” especially a two-time felony loser with no known address.

I wasn’t worried that anyone loyal to Dmitri was looking. I didn’t think there was anyone loyal to Dmitri still alive. If they were, they were holed up somewhere, waiting for their chance to get out of town. Or for a clear shot at Anton.

But whoever set the whole thing up,
they
were waiting. Or thought I was dead. And I had no way to tell which.

I shook my head, as if the movement would clear my thoughts. There were too many possibilities. And not enough data. Maybe whoever set it up
did
think I was dead. The shooters would have reported that I’d been hit. And that they’d put a round into my skull to make sure. An unidentified guy found dead in the Hunts Point wasteland wouldn’t have been enough to make the papers.

There
would
be a record, though. Homicides get investigated, even if not all equally. There’d be an attempt to identify any dead body. And if whoever tried to cap me knew anything about me, they’d know my prints would fall in five minutes.

So they had a tight time-frame, a location, and plenty of resources. And with Dmitri getting blown away, more than enough to add it up. I had to play it like a hand of five-card stud, now down to the final bet. I couldn’t see their hole card, but there were enough other gamblers at the table so that I had a pretty good count of the deck. I was betting they knew they hadn’t finished the job.

Wolfe had returned my passport. Some guy nobody recognized dropped it off at Mama’s. It was the same one I’d given her in the restaurant: the beautiful forgery she’d had made for me a while back. The new one had the same phony name. Only now the photo matched my new face.

But that didn’t mean I should be quick to use it. No matter how big the organization that had tried to kill me was, they couldn’t have been watching all the ways out of town—especially
this
town—for the past few months. So they couldn’t trap me at the border. But they could follow my trail … if I was dumb enough to leave paper footprints.

C
larence drove me to Philly. Only took a couple of hours, even with the sporadic snow. I shouldered my duffel bag and stepped into the terminal at Thirtieth and Market, where I grabbed an Amtrak for D.C. It was about ten minutes by cab from Union Station to the bus depot. I was on a Greyhound to Chicago by a little past midnight.

We hit Pittsburgh by morning, changed buses in Cleveland, made a rest stop somewhere in Indiana, and rolled into Chicago around three-thirty in the afternoon. Going by bus, it takes quite a while. And you have to do without a lot of features the airlines provide. Like metal detectors.

“Y
ou know this town?” The voice on the phone was cop-hard, but with an unmistakable Irish lilt.

“Been here a few times is all.”

“You’re not far from Wells Street. Just walk south—away from the lake—a couple of blocks. There’s a bookstore in the twelve-hundred block. Big one. Called Barbara’s. They’re used to all kinds of people in there. I’ll meet you outside at nine tonight. Just stand outside, to the left of the door as you come out. You smoke, right?”

“No.”

“Well, just
carry
a cigarette, then. Explains why you’re standing outside in this weather.”

“Okay.”

T
he bookstore was much bigger than a first glance would tell you. When I walked in, I saw a long narrow corridor with a counter to the right. But it spread out to my left, and just kept going. I wandered through the stacks, passing time until the meet. Walls of books. I thought about how much reading I’d done since … it happened. When I realized how close I’d come to losing my sight, I turned as indiscriminately greedy as a just-paroled prisoner in a whorehouse. I read everything I could get my hands on. Once I settled down, I kept up the reading but got more selective.

The last few months had been a lot like being back Inside. Reading, lifting weights … getting ready. And most of the time spent scheming about what I was getting ready for.

I spotted a new Joe Lansdale novel, one I hadn’t read. I almost grabbed it, but I checked myself in time. Maybe they wouldn’t remember every customer, but they were much more likely to remember someone who’d actually made a purchase. Independent bookstores aren’t like the chains. The people who work for the indies, most of them really love books. They’ll use any purchase to engage you in a conversation, find out what you like, try to hand-sell you something
they
like.

My cheap plastic electronic watch said it was five minutes to the meet. I knew it kept better time than the Rolex I had stashed in my duffel. I stepped outside and stood with my back to the building, cupping my hands around the flame from the butane lighter as I got a cigarette going. As soon as I did that, a flashlight blinked on and off from inside a white Nissan sedan parked at the curb. The passenger window moved down in sync with my approach. I leaned in.

“How’s Wolfe these days?” the driver said.

I got in.

“C
lancy,” he said as he pulled away, holding out his right hand.

Askew,” I told him, shaking his hand. “Wayne Askew.”

“Wolfe’s?” he asked. Meaning: he knew my true name, and was the new ID one of Wolfe’s creations?

“Yeah.”

He nodded, satisfied. Wolfe’s papers were the best in the business. If I got popped in his jurisdiction, odds were I’d get past the screens—as long as they stopped short of printing me.

The Nissan was overflowing. One cell phone was recharging from the cigarette-lighter outlet in the console, another sat on top of the dash, next to a small tape recorder, two pagers, and a notebook. There were a half-dozen pens clipped to the dash, and a sheaf of papers bulged from behind the sun visor. The windshield featured a series of hairline cracks. The ones in the dash were well past hairline, deep scars that showed the foam padding underneath. The back seat was covered with cartons, their tops cut off to make a filing system. Books were stacked haphazardly throughout the car, like pebbles from a carelessly tossed
I Ching
reading.

“You got a place?” he asked.

“No. I figured I’d wait until—”

“Okay. Where’s your stuff stashed?”

“Bus station. Twenty-four-hour locker.”

He nodded, not saying anything, letting the fact that we were heading for the depot speak for itself. He stopped outside. I went in, opened the locker, grabbed my duffel. When I got outside, I saw his trunk was open. I tossed the bag inside and climbed back into the passenger seat.

“You got a change of clothes with you?”

“Sure.”

“I mean a
change
, not fresh clothes. If you want to work the area I think you do, you have to dress the part. Can you go upscale with what you’re carrying around?”

“I can if I can get into a decent place for a few hours, take out the creases, clean up, and all; no problem.”

“All right. What about cash?”

“How much do you—?”

I interrupted myself when I saw the look on his face. Mumbled, “Sorry.”

“You think we’re all a pack of bribe-taking slobs?” he said, chuckling.

“No,” I said truthfully. “A lot of cops aren’t slobs.”

“Hah! All right, look, the thing about money is this: you’re going to
need
money if you want to poke around in the ritzy suburbs. That homeless-guy look you’re wearing, the only thing it’ll get you in the places you need to visit is rousted.”

“Fair enough.”

“And you’ll need transport, too.”

“I can pay whatever it costs. But I don’t want to book this ID if I don’t have to.”

“I can get you a car. But not Hertz rates.”

“I’m fine with that.”

T
he hotel was right off the lake. We walked straight over to the elevators. The security man at the entrance to the elevator bank opened his mouth, then shut it without a sound when Clancy grabbed his eyes.

The room was on the twenty-first floor, with a view of a driving range below.

“It’s three hundred a night,” Clancy said. “That includes the room showing as vacant on the computer.”

I handed him twelve C-notes, saying, “For the car, too,” as I did.

“Be downstairs tomorrow morning,” he said. “Six a.m., okay?”

“I’ll be there,” I told him.

I
unzipped the duffel, started laying out my stuff carefully.

Especially that shark-gray alpaca suit Michelle had insisted I spend a fortune on.

“This will never show a
hint
of a wrinkle, honey,” she’d said. “Just hang it in the bathroom and run the shower full-blast hot for an hour or so—it’ll be new every time you put it on.”

Remembering her muttered threats about never allowing a wire coat-hanger to invade the sacred alpaca, I located a wooden one in the closet and got the steam working.

Everything I had with me was new. Michelle had measured me herself, done all the shopping. That way, she got to do all the selecting.

“You need a
look
, sweetheart,” she said, talking quick and nervous, the way she does when a topic upsets her. “With that face … until it heals, I mean—then you can have plastic surgery and it’ll all be … Anyway, in an Army jacket, you look like a serial killer. But in
these
clothes, baby, you’ll look exotic, I swear it.”

So I’d kept quiet while she spent my money on all this new stuff. Didn’t bother to bring up that I already had a place full of new clothes, an abandoned factory building near the Eastern District High School in Bushwick. That had been about Pansy, too. I’d watched her being carried out of my old place on a stretcher, the whole place surrounded by NYPD. I thought they’d killed her, but they’d only tranq’ed her out. We managed to spring her from the shelter, but I’d had to find a new place. And leave everything I had in the old one.

When that happened, Michelle had said what a great opportunity it was—I’d needed a whole new wardrobe, anyway. Now that was gone, too.

NYPD had come calling because my old landlord had 911’ed me, saying the crawl space in his building where I lived was being used by a bunch of Arabs as a bomb factory. I’d had a sweet deal with him for a lot of years. His son was a rat who loved his work. I’d run across the little weasel hiding in the Witness Protection Program when I was looking for someone else, and I traded my silence for the free rent. It was unused space up there anyway; didn’t cost the owner a penny.

But when his kid got smoked in Vegas, the landlord decided I was the one who’d given him up, and dropped a ten-ton dime on me. Pansy might have been killed then, but the cops had heard her threats when they’d started battering the door down. So they’d called for Animal Control instead of going in—no way to tell a dog you’ve got a warrant.

I tracked the landlord’s unlisted phone and rang him one night. Told him I’d had nothing to do with what happened to his kid—the punk was addicted to informing, and Vegas was the wrong town for that hobby. I also told him that my dog could’ve been killed by his little trick.

He said he was sorry. He’d just assumed it was me who fingered his son. He said he’d make it right.

I told him he’d never see it coming.

Lying on the hotel bed in the Chicago night, I told myself the truth. The people who’d tried to hit me, they were pros. No question about it. Just a job. The ones I wanted were the string-pullers, not the puppets.

But the puppets had killed Pansy.

I thought about the setup I’d had for her, back at my place. The huge stainless-steel bowl anchored in a chunk of cement so it could withstand her onslaughts, the inverted water-cooler bottle, the dry dog food she could get for herself if I wasn’t around, the tarpapered roof where I’d take her so she could dump her loads without my having to walk her on the street. The giant rawhide bone that she adored so much she’d never annihilated it the way she had every other toy I’d gotten her, the heavy velour bathrobe she used as a blanket, the sheepskin she slept on …

Training her with reverse commands, so that “Sit!” meant attack. Poison-proofing her so she wouldn’t take food unless she heard the key word. Working with a long pole and a series of hired agitators until she’d learned to hit thigh-high, not leave her feet and make herself vulnerable.