The Poisoned Rose (14 page)

“Do you have everything?” I said.

She nodded. It was the only movement she made. She was frozen, waiting for me to catch on, willing me into taking action.

“You should get going, then,” I said.

“I could stay for a little while,” she suggested.

“No, you need to go, Tina. It’s time.”

She was hurt, more so than usual, probably because she saw this as her last chance. But I couldn’t care about that. She finished her packing just as Eddie pulled up and beeped his horn. I was thankful for my luck. She moved toward me, and I stepped aside to let her pass through the bedroom door. But instead of moving through it she stopped suddenly and faced me.

She looked at me but said nothing. Then, suddenly, she rose up onto her toes to kiss me. Her breasts brushed against my stomach, and she took the crook of my right elbow with her left hand. I turned my head and her lips grazed my unshaved cheek. It was an inexperienced kiss, rushed. She withdrew slowly, though, lowering her heels to the floor and looking at me. Her hand dropped from my elbow.

I didn’t move, didn’t offer any response. But that didn’t seem to faze her. She smiled and said in a voice that was still a girl’s, “Call me tomorrow, Mac.”

Then she crossed my living room and left my apartment without looking back. I listened to her go down the two flights of stairs, then stepped to the window and watched to make sure that she got into Eddie’s cab.

After the cab had driven out of my sight, I turned and looked around my place.

I was alone in it for the first time in a season.

I tried to go to back to sleep but the heat was too much. My fans were running on high, but they did nothing but stir around hot air. My bed felt strange after having slept on the couch for so long. But there was nothing I could do about that. After a while I slipped into a shallow sleep. I dreamed of the woman who had come to me last November, the woman I didn’t know. I’d been, of course, with no one since. I dreamed of us running from room to room in some great house. I think we were children, or at least were for part of the dream. It was night, and we listened to the sound of winter thunder, saw from some high window snow falling on an ocean the color of ball bearings.

Then I was awakened by the clanging of my telephone. I knew even before I answered it who would be on the other end.

“It’s me,” Frank said. He was on a pay phone, as usual. I heard the hissing of cars passing in the background. The line crackled sharply several times. I thought at one point that the connection had been severed and I had lost him. But I wasn’t that lucky.

“Yeah,” I said.

“You’re on.”

In my mind the snow was still falling.

“I’ll do what I can,” I said.

“Just find the girl, Mac. Just find the girl.”

He hung up.

Chapter Six

 

The street name on the slip of paper Frank had given me was a right-hand turn off Flanders Road, which ran from Hampton Bays into Riverhead. I found the side street easy enough and started down it. It was narrow, poorly lit, the homes small working-class cottages. The road came to a dead end on the shore of Flanders Bay, a few hundred yards from the main road.

A mailbox on a post was at the end of a long dirt driveway that lead up a slight grade to a cottage set on a bank overlooking the bay. The numbers on the mailbox matched the numbers on the slip of paper in my hand. I could see that the windows of the cottage were dark, and that there were no cars in the dirt driveway. I killed the motor and headlights and sat there behind the wheel and looked the place over.

After a while I opened my glove compartment and took out my flashlight and Spyderco knife. I clipped the knife inside my hip pocket as I got out of my car. I looked back up the street, toward Flanders Road. There was nothing to see but darkness. I listened carefully and heard only the lapping of waves on the shore of the bay behind me. I turned on the light to test it. The beam was weak, but it would have to do. I switched the light off again and started up toward the cottage. I walked on the grass, not wanting to leave the imprint of my sneakers in the dirt.

The cottage was set maybe a hundred feet back from the road and fifty feet from the bay. It was in an open lot surrounded on three sides by rows of trees. I walked close to the shore, close to the tall reeds that grew along it. I waited till I was directly in front of the cottage before I cut to my right and climbed the inclining lawn toward the front door.

There were wraparound windows on three sides of the cottage. As I approached it I could see the reflection of the smoky night sky in the wide panes. I moved quietly to the front door, then stopped and listened hard. I heard nothing but my own breathing.

I started up the short steps to the front door. I noticed at once that it was ajar by a few inches. I eased the door open with the back of my hand, moving it just enough so I could pass through. I took one last look behind me and slipped inside.

It was dark but I didn’t take out my flashlight. I stood there inside the door for a while, trying to make out what I could. The front half of the cottage was an open room, part living room, part office. The back half was divided into two rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom. The bedroom door was open. Eventually, when my eyes adjusted, I made out an unmade bed in that room and a bare wall beyond it.

I took a few steps into that front room. The planks beneath my feet were wide and sturdy, but still they creaked. The entire cottage seemed well built, tight like a ship. The wraparound windows offered a nice view of the bay. But they gave me the feeling of being exposed, a feeling even all this dark around me couldn’t quell.

Eventually I made my way deeper into the cottage. I went to the bedroom door and peered in to make certain no one was there. Then I looked into the kitchen. It was empty. There were dirty dishes in the sink, though, and the lingering smell of recent cooking.

There was a back door in the kitchen. I went to it and opened it a few inches, just in case I needed to go through it quickly.

I went back into the front room. Since there was no one around for me to ask the whereabouts of the Welles woman, I decided not to waste the trip and take a look around and see what I could find. Maybe I could get lucky and come across an address or phone number or something and get out of there. That would be enough to get Frank off my back for good.

On the office side of the front room was a desk. I went to it and took out my flashlight and carefully searched through the drawers. I stayed down low, under the windows, out of sight. I found bank statements and bills and notices of payment overdue from the Bank of the Hamptons. I found a payment book with the tear slips for April, May, and June still attached.

On top of the desk was an electric typewriter with a piece of paper in the roller. I aimed my dying light at it and saw what looked like prose, part of a story of some kind. I read a few lines. It was a first-person narrative that seemed concerned with the look of a rose in a vase on a window sill at first light. I didn’t read anymore.

I opened the desk drawer directly under the typewriter and searched through it. There was nothing but paper clips and disposable pens and tubes of correcting fluid. There was a filing cabinet near the desk, but its drawers were locked. I took a look around the room, making a sweep with my dull light, searching for something, anything that might help me. In the other half of the room, the living room half, was a bookcase with a few dozen paperback books spread out on the shelves. I started to cross toward it, passing a door I hadn’t seen before, a door set between the kitchen and the bedroom. It was cut into the wall panels, invisible except for its black hinges and small handle. It must have been a closet door. I stopped at it and waited a moment and listened, then reached for the handle. But before I could touch it the door flung suddenly open. I jumped back, the swinging door missing me by an inch, the rush of air its motion created brushing past my face.

Suddenly there was movement, footsteps and a lot of rushing around. A man with a chrome-plated .357 revolver lunged out at me, the gun aimed at my head. I took a few steps back, out of blind reflex, and raised my hands. He took as many steps forward. He pulled the hammer back with his thumb. There was maybe six feet between us. I thought about moving, about what I’d been trained to do when faced with an assailant armed with a gun. But before I could do anything, another man came rushing in from the kitchen. He held a smaller revolver with a dark finish in his outstretched hand. It, too, was aimed directly at my head.

He came in closer than the first one and pressed the muzzle against my temple. I knew by this that he was an amateur.

“Don’t make a fucking move,” he said.

The other one stepped toward a table near the door, reached down and switched on a lamp. He kept his eyes on me as he went, his gun raised and aimed at me.

Above and below the lamp a circle of white light shone, but the rest of the room caught only the soft yellow light cast through the heavy lamp shade. The wraparound windows went dark then, the night beyond them now invisible. The windows became like mirrors, reflecting from three sides distorted images of everything inside that small room.

The man by the lamp was looking at my face. He appeared puzzled, almost surprised. The barrel of his gun lowered, drifting down. Suddenly, he seemed preoccupied, troubled.

The man directly beside me was a kid, maybe twenty, maybe less. He was still caught up in the excitement, still riding the commotion. His breathing was fast and shallow. He ordered me to hand over my flashlight. I let slip from my hand instead. It fell to the floor with a thud. He stooped down to pick it up.

The man by the lamp had a shaved head and Fu Manchu beard. Dark tribal tattoos covered his forearms. He seemed concerned by the sight of me, as if he were uncertain just what my presence here meant.

“I know you,” he muttered.

The kid beside me had the flashlight in his left hand. He went to press the barrel of his revolver once again against my temple.

“Is this the guy?” the kid asked.

“No,” the bald man answered. “It’s someone else. It’s another guy.” He paused, then said to me, “How the hell did you find me? What the fuck do you want?”

“I’m just looking for money.” I said. “That’s all.”

“Bullshit,” the bald one said. “I’ve seen you before. You don’t remember me.”

“I don’t want any trouble.” I held my hands up at shoulder level. “I didn’t take anything. Let me walk out of here now and you’ll never see me again.”

“Let’s just fucking waste him and get out of here,” the kid said. His voice was increasing in pitch. He was getting wild with fear. “Let’s just take him out back and pop him.”

The bald one was calmer. He looked at me curiously and said, “He sent you, didn’t he?”

“Who?”

“The brother. Her brother. He sent you, didn’t he?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Whose brother?”

“Let’s just fucking pop him and go. They know where to find us, man. Let’s just take him out back and pop him.”

“Are you working with someone else or alone? Was that you outside?”

“What?”

“We heard someone outside, coming through the woods.”

“No, that wasn’t me, man.”

“How did the bastard know where to find me?”

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“That rat bastard brother of hers. How did he know where I was?”

“I was just looking for money.”

“You’re no thief.”

“Let’s just fucking pop him and get out of here,” the kid insisted. His knees were drawn together, as if he had to piss badly.

“First I want some answers from our friend here,” the bald one said.

“I’ve told you, I don’t know any brother.”

The bald one lost his temper. “Bullshit! How did you find us?”

The kid waved his hand suddenly to get his partner to look at him. We both did. He raised his index finger to his lips, then whispered, “There’s someone else. He’s out back. I can hear him moving around.”

The bald one looked at me. But before anyone could say anything more a cracking sound came from outside, a hard, brittle snap that was followed immediately by the sound of a window shattering.

My knees buckled and I dropped quickly to the floor. The kid beside me did the same, but he landed hard. The bald one—the one who looked puzzled by my presence—came down last.

I expected more gunshots from outside but heard nothing except the labored and panicked breathing coming from myself and those around me. After a minute the guy with the shaved head got up into a crouch, ready to stand, ready to fight. He held his gun with both hands, the muzzle pointed upward.

“Stay down,” I whispered.

He shot me a look as if to tell me to shut up. He was wired, his eyes wide.

The kid was still on the floor beside me. He hadn’t moved since he took his hard fall. I was about to reach down and take his revolver away when I felt something warm under my hand. I lifted it fast and saw that there was blood on my palm.

I scrambled up into a crouch. Blood was spreading all around the kid. He was flat out on his back, his eyes open and blinking, his mouth working as if he were trying to speak.

Only he wasn’t trying to speak. He was trying to breathe. I heard small gurgling sounds come from him then, and deep wheezing. Fine streams of blood were spurting into the air. They rose, arced, then fell in long drops down to the floor.

I could see that a bullet had sliced his throat open. Where blood wasn’t gushing, it flowed, running fast like hot motor oil.

“Fucking shit,” I said. I went to him and knelt beside him and pressed both of my hands against the open wound in his neck, trying to stop the flow. I felt warm blood spray against my palms and spread between my fingers. But I stayed there, leaning with my weight on the wound.

The blood wouldn’t stop flowing, though. I was kneeling in it, it was everywhere now, it just kept coming.

I said to the one with the shaved head, “Get me something to stop the bleeding.”

But he didn’t move. I looked at him. He was frozen, breathing fast, a glaze of sweat covering his face.

“I need something to stop the bleeding,” I told him. “A towel, anything. C’mon, don’t just sit there, do something. You want your friend to die?”

It took him a moment, but then he crawled to the couch, pulled off a blanket and brought it to me.

I told him to fold it up. He did, then handed it to me. I grabbed it and applied it to the kid’s throat, pressing my bloodied hands on it and leaning forward, my elbows locked.

“Call an ambulance,” I said.

Again, he didn’t move. He just looked at me.

“Call an ambulance!”

He watched my face and shook his head from side to side. “I can’t be here when the police come,” he said. “Neither can you, right?”

I said nothing. He was not at all familiar to me, and yet he seemed to know about me. I was thinking this when he said the strangest thing to me.

“I think this makes us even, man. Take care of yourself.”

He looked toward the broken window, then rose and moved, bent at the waist, to the front door. He paused there, his .357 held in both hands, and looked back at me. Then he broke into a run, bolting out the door.

I listened to his hard run across the grass till I could hear it no more. I braced myself for more gunshots but none came. All I could hear was the sound of the bay tapping the shore fifty feet down the sloping lawn and the last few feeble breaths of the kid.

His face was expressionless, his mouth hanging open dumbly, his eyelids half closed. His skin was white, his forehead already waxy. I eased back on the compress and removed my hands. Whoever this kid was, he was dead, and whoever the guy with the shaved head was, he was long gone. It was time for me to go, too.

I pulled off my T-shirt and wiped down the desk and the filing cabinet. Then I used it to wipe my hands. I got them as clean as they would get for now. I picked my flashlight up off the floor, then grabbed the bloody blanket and went to the front door. I paused there to listen.

The yard was still, quiet. I listened for a good minute, listening for the sound of someone in the woods, for the sound of sirens approaching. But I heard neither of these things, just a night so quiet I couldn’t tell whether to feel at ease or rise to my toes.

Eventually, I did what the guy with the shaved head did. I bolted through the door and out into the night. I ran down the lawn toward the street. Before I got into my car, I took off my blood-covered sneakers, wrapped my shirt around them, then folded the blanket over that. I sat the bundle on the floor beneath the passenger seat and flung my flashlight over the high grass and out into the bay. The water swallowed it with a gulp.

Back in my apartment, I tossed the blanket and its contents into a garbage bag, then removed my jeans and tossed them in, too. I took a quick shower, scrubbing the blood off my hands and from under my nails. Then I dried off and put on clean jeans, another T-shirt, and my work boots.