The Good Guy (18 page)

Thirty-Eight

W
ith a high forehead, bushy white eyebrows,
a solid jaw, and weathered skin, the man seeking Cynthia looked like a sea captain from a harder century, one who had chased down a white whale, killed it, rendered it, and brought to port a ship full of barreled blubber oil and ambergris.

He stopped at the threshold of the kitchen, frowned at Krait sitting at the table, and said, “Who’re you?”

“Rudyard Kipling. You must be Malcolm.”

“Rudyard Kipling—he’s some dead writer.”

“Yes, I was named after him, and I don’t like his work, just a poem or two.”

Suspicion knitted the two bushy eyebrows into one. “What’re you doing here?”

“Beth and James invited me. We’re all terrific friends of Judi and Frankie.”

“Judi and Frankie are in Paris.”

“I was supposed to go with them, but I had to cancel. Have you had breakfast, Malcolm?”

“Where’s Cynthia?”

“She and I have thrown all carbohydrate caution to the wind. We’re having hot chocolate and buttered cinnamon toast. She’s such marvelous good company, your wife.”

Krait needed to entice the old man into the kitchen. The Glock lay on the chair where Cynthia had not seen it. Malcolm couldn’t see it, either, from where he stood. If Krait reached for it, however, Malcolm, already suspicious, might back off, and for sure he would bolt when he saw the gun coming up.

Frowning at Cynthia’s plate and mug on the table, Malcolm said, “But where is she?”

Pointing to the closed door of the half bath, Krait said, “The call of nature. We were just talking about Cynthia’s efforts to save the eagles and the whales. I so admire that.”

“What?”

“Eagles and whales. And hunger in Africa. You must be proud of her giving nature.”

“Bethany and Jim never mentioned any Rudyard Kipling.”

“Well, honestly, I’m not a very interesting person, Malcolm. For every thousand Judi and Frankie stories, they’d have at most one about me.”

The old man had steel-gray eyes and a sword-sharp stare. He said, “Something’s wrong with you.”

“Well,” said Krait, “I’ve never liked my nose.”

Malcolm called out, “Cynthia!”

Neither of them looked at the door to the half bath. They kept their eyes on each other.

Krait reached for the Glock.

The old man bolted.

Getting to his feet so fast that he knocked over his chair, thumbing the slide selector to full-auto, Krait brought the pistol to bear on the doorway. Malcolm had fled from sight.

Krait went after him.

Having cleared the dining room as quick as a boy, the old man knocked against an end table in the living room, stumbled, grabbed at an armchair to right himself.

Krait put a short burst in his back, from rump to neck. The sound suppressor absorbed the concussion so completely that a blowgun would have made more noise.

The old man fell facedown and lay there, head turned to one side. His eye was peeled wide; but his stare could not accurately be called sharp anymore.

Standing over Malcolm, Krait emptied the extended magazine into him. The body twitched, not with life but with the impacts.

Wasting twenty or more rounds on a dead man wasn’t practical, but it was necessary.

A lesser man than Krait, with less self-control, might have replaced the depleted magazine with a fresh one and emptied that, too. Composure and forbearance were among his most defining character traits, but even
his
singular patience might be tried to the breaking point.

He opened the front door and found Cynthia’s raincoat draped over the arm of the glider on the porch. Her umbrella and Malcolm’s lay on the floor. He brought everything inside and locked the door.

He hung her coat in the foyer closet. He put the umbrellas there, as well.

In the kitchen, he sat at the table with his cell phone and checked his E-mail. While chatting with Cynthia, he had received word that the Explorer had been abandoned in a restaurant parking lot.

No stolen-vehicle reports had been made from the blocks around the restaurant yet; but somebody might not find his car missing for hours.

Krait thought maybe a bus, and he sent that message. Not many buses would have been running that route at that hour. They wouldn’t have to find and question more than a couple of drivers.

After plugging his phone into its charger, he hand-washed the breakfast dishes, put them away, and wiped off the table.

He had no intention of cleaning up the mess in the half bath or the one in the living room. Cynthia and Malcolm had come nosing around because their daughter and son-in-law had failed to establish privacy rules and boundaries. This was not his business now; it was a family matter.

Having tidied the kitchen, he went upstairs to the master bedroom to learn if Bethany and Jim kept any pornographic videos or interesting sex toys.

He discovered neither erotica nor anything else that gave him any insights into the kind of people they were. Jim folded rather than rolled his socks. A few of Bethany’s panties had a cute little pink bunny embroidered at the hip. Not much here for the tabloids.

The most interesting thing in their bathroom drawers were the number of brands—and the quantity—of laxatives. These people either ate no fiber whatsoever or they had colons as inefficient as Third World plumbing.

Bethany and Jim were such a bland pair that Krait wondered why the fabled Judi and Frankie wanted anything to do with them.

The toothbrushes were pink and blue. He used the pink one, assuming it was Bethany’s. But he applied the men’s rather than the women’s deodorant.

Thereafter, he was reduced to passing time in the kitchen with the issue of
O
that had been in the mail.

At 7:15, he opened the front door and smiled at the sight of the hanging travel bag placed neatly on the porch glider and the small carryall standing beside it. His clothes had been delivered.

The rain had stopped altogether. Trees dripped. Sun had broken through the clouds, and the wet street had begun to steam.

Fifteen minutes later, dressed for the day, he inspected himself in a full-length beveled mirror on the back of the master-bathroom door.

When Bethany was naked in this bathroom, perhaps admirers in the mirror world watched her without her knowledge. Krait could not see those who might live in the reversed reality, only himself looking back at him, but that didn’t mean the inhabitants of the other realm were likewise limited in their vision.

Downstairs once more, as he approached the front door, he heard a key in the lock. The deadbolt turned, and the door opened.

A woman stepped into the house, made a small sound of surprise at the sight of him, and said, “You startled me.”

“And you me. Bethany and Jim didn’t tell me to expect anyone.”

“I’m Nora, from next door.”

She was a petite but buxom woman with a pixie haircut and blue nail polish of which he disapproved.

“This is like a house in one of those sitcoms,” Krait said, “where everyone just bursts right in without knocking or ringing the bell.”

“Beth pays me to make five dinners every week, put them in her freezer,” said Nora. “I stock her refrigerator Monday, cook Tuesday.”

“Then it must be thanks to you that we had such a brilliantly scrumptious dinner last evening.”

“Oh, you’re staying over?”

“I’m a rude, drop-in, ten-minute-warning houseguest, but dear Beth always pretends to be glad to see me. Name’s Richard Kotzwinkel, everyone calls me Ricky.”

He stepped back to encourage her to enter, but also to block her view of Malcolm in the living room.

“Gee, Ricky, I don’t want to intrude—”

“No, come in, come in. Cynthia and I just had a long fabulously chatty breakfast together after the early birds raced off to get the worm or whatever they get at an investment-banking firm.”

“Cynthia’s here?”

“In the kitchen. And Malcolm stopped in a little while ago.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Though he’s something of a sourpuss compared to dear Cindy.”

She stepped farther inside and closed the door behind her. “Was it really scrumptious?”

“Was what? Oh, you mean your dinner. Divine. It was divine.”

“Which selection did she heat up?” Nora asked.

Her eyes were a lively blue. She had full lips and smooth skin.

“Chicken,” he said. “We had the chicken.”

He considered raping her, but he just killed her. For variety, he used his hands.

Collateral damage was frowned upon by those who solicited him to go on these missions, so he rarely popped bystanders in the process of nailing his target. His generous petitioners would understand. As the bumper sticker says,
SHIT HAPPENS
.

On the porch, he pulled the door shut and used Nora’s key to lock it, although that didn’t seem likely to keep out anyone.

Thirty-Nine

A
s they finished breakfast, Pete Santo called.
Tim set his cell on speakerphone and stood it beside the waffle plate.

“I’m not calling from my place,” Pete said. “This is strictly cell-to-cell.”

“Something happened,” Tim said. “What happened?”

“I stayed away from restricted law-enforcement databases, just Googled Kravet’s different names. I hit pay dirt, dug in it for a while—and then my cable service failed.”

“Maybe coincidence,” Tim said.

“Like Santa Claus showing up on Christmas Eve. And talk about showing up—not half an hour later, around five o’clock, three guys pay a visit.”

“Not the three wise men.”

“More like wiseguys.”

“What did they want?” Linda asked.

“I was out when they came. Watched them from up the street. I’m not going back anytime soon.”

“You didn’t leave Zoey there?” Linda asked.

“Zoey’s with me.”

Tim said, “So what was the pay dirt?”

Instead of answering, Pete said, “Listen, Hitch Lombard knows my cell number, so these guys have it, too. Maybe they know yours.”

“They know it,” Tim confirmed. “But you don’t mean they can grab our conversation out of thin air?”

“Not your local cops, but maybe these guys. Who knows. They get better at this stuff every week.”

Linda said, “And though tracing a cell’s location isn’t as easy as locating a fixed phone, it’s totally doable.”

Tim threw a look at her.

She threw it back and said, “Book research.”

“You need to go buy a disposable cell phone,” Pete said, “so you have a number they don’t know. Then call me at another phone they don’t know.”

“You gonna send me the number by psychic waves?” Tim asked.

“How’s this. Remember the guy who lost his virginity while he was dressed up as Shrek?”

“The guy who now has five kids.”

“That’s the guy who.”

“I don’t have his number.”

“Call him at work. It’s in the directory. Ask for him, give your name, they’ll put you through. I’ll be there in an hour.”

Tim terminated the call. Then he switched off the cell phone.

“Who’s the guy who?” Linda asked.

“Pete’s cousin Santiago.”

“Dressed up as Shrek?”

“It was a costume party. I think everybody had to come as a cartoon character. I wasn’t there.”

“What was
she
dressed as?”

“Jessica Rabbit from
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
. Her name’s Mina. He married her. The kids are really cute and green.”

Pushing her chair back from the table, she said, “We better be out of here soon.”

Tim took his clothes from the dryer and ironed them while Linda cleaned up the breakfast dishes. Their rain-sodden shoes hadn’t fully dried, but they were wearable.

In the two-car garage stood Teresa’s four-year-old Honda Accord. One of her traveling companions had driven them to the airport.

Linda had found the keys in a kitchen drawer; but she handed them to Tim.

“If there’s got to be any stunt driving like last night,” she said, “you better be the one behind the wheel.”

Although he didn’t have adequate legroom, he liked the Honda. It was nondescript, and it didn’t have any satellite uplink by which they might be tracked.

As the garage door rolled up, Tim half expected that the hungry-eyed killer would be standing in the driveway, holding a machine pistol.

Blades of sunlight thrust through the torn fabric of the cloud-disheveled sky and liberated the land from the lingering gloom of the recent storm.

“Where do we get a disposable cell phone at this hour?” she asked.

Driving east, heading toward a freeway, he said, “The warehouse clubs open early. I have a membership in one through the union. But I’m not carrying much money.”

Withdrawing a fat envelope from her purse, she said, “I’ve got five thousand in hundreds.”

“I missed the moment when you knocked over a bank.”

“I’ve got gold coins hidden at home, too. Last night, when I had to grab something, cash money seemed more practical.”

“Don’t trust banks?”

“I’ve got money in the bank. But you can’t always get bank money as fast as you might need it. This is my falls-apart money.”

“For when what falls apart?”

“Anything. Everything.”

“You think it’s the End Times or something?”

“Things fell apart last night, didn’t they?”

“I guess they did,” he acknowledged.

She looked grim when she said, “I’m never going to be helpless again.”

“We’re in a tight place, but we aren’t helpless,” he assured her.

“I don’t mean now,” she said, returning the money to her purse.

“You mean like you were helpless back then…with Molly and the other stuff.”

“Yeah.”

“You want to talk about the other stuff?”

“No.”

“You told me about Molly.”

“Telling that much hurt enough,” she said.

Tim followed a rising freeway entrance. Heavy but unobstructed morning traffic raced at reckless speed through what the real-estate agents would call “another day in paradise.”

“In the end,” he said, “we’re all helpless, if you want to get to the hard truth of things.”

“I like hard truth. But damn if I’m near the end yet.”

Thereafter, they rode in silence all the way to the exit that would take them to the warehouse club.

The silence was comfortable. Tim suspected that no matter how far and long they might yet go together, they were already past any kind of silence that would feel strained.

The awkwardness would come when they were at last ready to make their separate revelations.