Sleeping Policemen (19 page)

Nick caught a swift internal glimpse of Casey Nicole Barrett, a crimson thread of blood unspooling across her girlish breast—and now the image held nothing for him, just the dry despair of self-knowledge.

The man behind the desk spoke, his voice mellifluous, deep, his words enunciated with clipped precision. “Cost is not an object. I want it. Get it.” He lowered the phone into its cradle gently.

He sat a moment longer with his back to them, and then he said: “You have them, Lawrence?”

Evans was a man transformed. The stagey folksiness—pure movie psycho, Nick thought, a mask, nothing more—had dropped away. He stood before the desk like a man at attention, his face in three-quarters profile, the toothpick tucked out of sight. His voice was quiet, accentless. “Yes, sir. They're right here.”

The chair spun slowly around.

Nick felt a burst of hysterical laughter well into his throat as the bizarre suitability of the man's nickname—

—
the Pachyderm
—

—became evident. A crazy flood of names—Jumbo, Jabba the Hutt, Babar—spilled through his mind, and for a single terrifying moment he knew that the clot of crazed hilarity would burst between his lips and detonate inside the silent, airless room, dooming them all. Then Sue coughed, a single
chuff
of noise that might have been laughter, might have been merely the sharp intake of horrified breath, might have been nothing at all—and the crisis passed.

He breathed deeply, noticing now that the air here was odorless, cooler than that in the antechamber, neither hot nor cold, but simply, breathably comfortable, driven by the faraway
woosh
of central air conditioning.

And he noticed, too, that the man named Vergil Gutman was a freak. Nick forced himself not to step away, to recoil physically as a wave of atavistic dismay crashed through him. It was not merely that Gutman was overweight—though he was, enormously so, almost as large as the slack-fleshed woman at the Smokin Mountain, a thick slab of fat encased like a sausage in a perfectly tailored dark suit. Nor was it his complexion: his skull clean-shaven or perhaps naturally hairless, the flesh over his left eye whorled and pebbled like the flesh of a newly healed burn victim. Nick could handle all that—could handle even the spongy growth which curved across his left cheek, dripping under his mouth like candle wax and twisting his lower lip into a perpetual sneer.

No.

What he could not handle, what he could not bear to look at, were Gutman's eyes. His eyes, blue as a dream sea on a summer afternoon, and the pale, flawless stretch of his right cheek, and his manicured and perfectly formed right hand, the hand of a pianist, a surgeon. Entranced, Nick watched that hand reach out to the humidor at the edge of the desk and remove a thick cigar. With the other hand—tumorous, the fingers thickened—Gutman produced a silver cigar cutter, a miniature guillotine, its blade suspended above the frame of a perfect circle. He trimmed the cigar and placed the cutter on the desk, its razored edge gleaming in the wash of light from the screens. And Nick, watching the interplay of those hands, Jekyll and Hyde, suddenly understood what so disturbed him: not the wounded complexion of the man on the other side of the desk, but that monster's normal twin, the sorrowful human eyes peering from that sea of tortured flesh, like the eyes of a drowning man.

Gutman studied them silently.

At last, he said, “Please, sit down.” He gestured expansively at the leather furniture. “I am informed you've had a difficult morning.”

They swam forward through that strange, drifting sea of blue light. Nick collapsed beside Sue in the soft leather love seat, abruptly boneless with exhaustion.

“You must be thirsty. Would you care for a drink?”

After a moment, Sue said, “Water would be nice. If you have it.”

“Coke,” Finney said, and Nick said, “Anything's fine.”

Gutman said, “And I shall have Glenfiddich and water, if you would be so kind, Lawrence.”

Evans retreated into a shadowy corner without a word. Ice tinkled, a can opened. Silently, Gutman lit his cigar with a silver butane lighter, examined it critically, puffed at it until he had it burning to his satisfaction. Nick caught a faint hint of the fragrance—rich and sweet—before that efficient air-conditioning whisked it away.

Evans appeared with their drinks. He distributed them and disappeared with the tray. A moment later, he returned.

Nick tasted his Coke, ice-cold, sweet. Even in these circumstances, it tasted better than anything he could ever have imagined. It had been hours—last night at Sue's—since he had eaten anything. He placed the glass on a little table by the loveseat, trying not to let his hand shake.

Gutman leaned forward, glancing at Evans, motionless beside the desk. “You understand that we have a problem here. First you run over poor, dear Aubrey, whom I rather liked, though he proved unfaithful in the end. What endless amounts of trouble that caused you will never know. And then you dump Mr. Pomeroy rather unceremoniously into a quarry. I might thank you for that—I found him an unutterable nuisance—but alas I cannot. His abrupt disappearance will no doubt merely entangle me further in unpleasantness. So you have caused me all manner of heartache and worry, and now you present me with still another problem: whatever in the world am I to do with you?”

He sipped his drink. Nick glanced at Finney. Their nominal spokesman, the Senator's golden-tongued progeny, had at last fallen silent. He slumped in the armchair like a waif, a lost expression on his face, his dark hair in sweaty ringlets across his forehead.

Gutman said, “As you can see, I am a man who has lived with distress and worry, with pain, in the past. And yet, never, in all my years of suffering unpleasantness, never in all my years in this business which too often requires me to do things I would not ordinarily want to do, have I faced any problem quite like that you present me with. Whatever am I to do with you?” He sighed dramatically, puffed thoughtfully on his cigar. “I suppose I could let you go. I've no particular use for you, except perhaps for the girl. We could find something to do with her, could we not, Lawrence?”

Sue groaned.

Gutman's cold eyes fell on Nick. “What if I allow you two to go?” He nodded at Finney. “In exchange for the girl. An even trade.”

Nick met Gutman's eyes, then glanced away, saying nothing. None of us, he thought, none of us are going to walk away.

“No,” Sue said, “please. I'll never tell anyone—”

Gutman smiled quizzically. “Whatever is there to tell, dear? You and your friends have killed two men. We—
we
have done nothing.”

“The woman at that store,” Sue whispered. “He killed her. He killed Tucker.”

“Well, there is that. And see how swiftly you betrayed our confidence? No, I fear we cannot risk releasing you, can we, Lawrence?”

“I don't think so, Mr. Gutman.”

“She is rather attractive in her way. A redhead might provide some novelty.” A single panicked sob burst from Sue. She leaned against Nick, slopping ice water across his thigh. Nick put his arm around her and stared back at Gutman, that monstrous smile, trying to hide the stark terror he felt in his heart. Gutman said, “As for you gentlemen, I suppose Lawrence will have to kill you. You might ask him to do it painlessly, though I rather doubt he would honor such a request. You have been so much trouble, after all.”

Evans smiled thinly.

And now Finney
did
speak. He hunched forward, his lean face intense, his eyes feverish. “My Dad, Senator—”

“Ahh, yes. Senator Durant.”

“He has money, he can get money—”

“We all have money,” Sue whispered, and Nick felt a rotten sac burst inside him, spilling Glory's familiar shame through his guts. That desolate moment in the bus station cut through him like a scalpel, that old sense of their little clique splintering along fault lines of money, the old habit of privilege. “Our parents, they would pay anything. Anything, you hear me—”

“Anything,” Finney said. “Anything …”

Gutman smiled mockingly, dashed ashes into a tray on his desk. “You have nothing I want, surely you see that.”

The statement burned into Nick's mind, bright and unavoidable.
Gutman didn't know
. Not about the bus station locker, not about the tape. As far as Gutman knew, they were just kids who had inadvertently killed one man and then purposely killed another to cover up the first one. They were problematic in that the identities of their victims drew him unwanted attention, but that was all.

Or so Gutman thought.

The truth was, they
did
have something Gutman would want: the video, sole record of the rape and murder of a girl who had turned out to be more than another victim, more than another small-town runaway—

—
like Carrie Witherspoon
—

—hungry for big-city wonder.

Nick could see the tape there in the bright eye of his imagination, salvation, a black plastic rectangle on the vanity in Finney's downstairs bathroom. He squeezed Sue's shoulder and eased away from her. As he leaned toward Gutman, his mind whirled with half-realized hopes, cancelled dreams: the chance that somehow he might find a way to save them; that he might salvage that alone from all the things which he had dreamed of: grad school and the money, that green orgastic light burning on a distant shore, beyond the imprisoning gray reach of the Gulf.

Maybe he could save Sue.

Maybe he could save them all.

Nick's fingers shook when he reached into his jacket pocket. When he dropped the thick roll of cash on the desk, it was like relinquishing a piece of his heart.

For a long moment, no one said anything.

The room tore itself free of the planet, thrown into a new orbit by the pull of the money, this bright, new sun.

Gutman sipped his scotch and eyed Nick across the rim of the glass, his hulking head and shoulders gaining solidity from the ghostly halo of the video screens. He placed the cigar in its ash tray and picked up Nick's offering. He slid the rubber band off and counted the money. When he finished, he snapped the rubber band around the roll once again and dropped it into a desk drawer.

Somebody slammed a window in Nick's heart.

“That is very generous of you, Mr.—” He glanced at Evans.

“Laymon.”

“Yes. The unfortunate Mr. Tucker could not join us. And—” He nodded. “Mr. Durant has of course acquainted me with his identity.” He looked at Nick. “But as I said, money has little power over me. I have plenty of money.”

“I took it from the blond man. Aubrey.”

“Yes, he stole it from me. I would have thought he was smarter than to carry it with him, but Aubrey was never known for his intellect. He had other skills which made him useful to a man like me.”

“That's not all he had.”

The blue eyes flickered with interest. “Then he was even dumber than I thought.”

“He had a key. To a bus station locker. We found a video tape in the locker.”

“Indeed?” Gutman crossed his arms on the desk, lacing his tumorous fingers with his normal ones. Those Jekyll and Hyde hands charmed Nick, entranced him.

Nick tore his eyes away. “Your voice is on the video. And two other men.”

Evans wheeled to face Nick, those piggy eyes narrowing.

Gutman lifted his left hand, the bad one. It seemed to flicker in that undersea light, like a motion picture just out of focus, liquid with potential metamorphosis. Nick's mind lurched into that boyhood fever dream, his own hands swollen to the size of parade balloons. A knot of terror pushed into his throat. He swallowed hard.

“
Pace
, Lawrence. Let the young man have his say.”

“A girl dies on the video. Her name is Casey Barrett. Her father is rich, the kind of man who could destroy an operation like this. It's the kind of thing you can't have floating around.”

Gutman chuckled ruefully. “So resourceful, this one, Lawrence. And yet so stupid.” Gutman's good hand toyed with the cigar trimmer. “You understand, the tape is a specialty product—a one of a kind item in a series produced at the request of a most select client—your father probably knows him, Mr. Durant. This client is a man with … specialized tastes. One of the perks of power and privilege, the indulgence of such tastes. As for the girl and her father—those facts merely enhance the tape's value. My client knows Mr. Barrett, you see. Has visited Mr. Barrett's estate, met his daughter face to face. He
chose
her, you might say.”

Nick swallowed. “You took her, didn't you?”

“There are holes in the world, Mr. Laymon. People fall through them. As you have.” Gutman smiled. “And now you wish to use the tape for yourself. You want to climb out of your hole. A word to the wise: Let that poor fool Aubrey be a lesson to you. Had he come to me with his complaints, we might have negotiated his salary demands like reasonable men. Instead, he chose Mr. Pomeroy, with whom you are of course acquainted. Who knows? Perhaps he could have worked a deal with Mr. Barrett's diminutive private investiga tor had he remembered his mother's first lesson: Look both ways before you cross the street. As it was, he was lucky. He died suddenly, painlessly. Had I caught up with him—and I would have, indeed I was about to, Lawrence here was in close pursuit—poor Aubrey's denouement would have been, shall we say, protracted. You would be well advised to keep that in mind, Mr. Laymon, as you deal with me. Lest you suffer a needlessly painful demise yourself.” Gutman laughed again. “So please, honor me with your proposal. I await it with bated breath.”

Nick looked first at Finney—his eyes full of that emptiness, that vacuum where his confidence used to be—and then at Sue. “A trade. You can have the tape, but we walk. All of us.”

“Straight into the local precinct house, no doubt—though I wouldn't recommend a Knoxville office. What is to prevent you from betraying us into the hands of our enemies? What of that, Mr.Laymon?”