Lawrence Block - A Walk Among the Tombstones

“I wasn’t sure.”

“You knew there wasn’t. That’s all right. You got the girl and we got the money. It all worked out.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t try to follow me.”

“I won’t.”

“No, I know you won’t.”

He didn’t say anything more, and I thought he had slipped away. I kept walking, and when I’d gone a dozen steps he called after me.

“I’m sorry about the fingers,” he said. “It was an accident.”

“You quiet,” TJ said.

I was driving Kenan’s Buick. As soon as Lucia Landau had reached her father’s side, he had scooped her up in his arms and slung her over his shoulder and hurried back to his car, with Dani and Pavel taking off after him. “I told him not to wait around,” Kenan had said. “Kid needed a doctor. He’s got somebody lives in the neighborhood, guy’ll come to the house.”

So that had left two cars for the four of us, and when we reached them Kenan tossed me the Buick’s keys and said he would ride with his brother. “Come on out to Bay Ridge,” he said. “We’ll send out for pizza or something. Then I’ll run you two home.”

We were stopped at a traffic light when TJ told me I was quiet, and I couldn’t argue with that. Neither of us had said a word since we got in the car. I still hadn’t shaken off the effect of the conversation with Callander. I said something to the effect that our activities had taken a lot out of me.

“You was cool, though,” he said. “Standin’ up there with those dudes.”

“Where were you? We thought you were back at the car.”

He shook his head. “I circled around ’em. Thought maybe I could see this third man, one with the rifle.”

“There wasn’t any third man.”

“Sure made him hard to see. What I did, I made a big circle around ’em and slipped out the place they came in. I found their car.”

“How did you manage that?”

“Wasn’t hard. I seen it before, it was the same Honda again. I backed up against a pole an’ kept an eye on it an’ the dude without no jacket came hurrying out of the graveyard an’ threw a suitcase in the trunk. Then he turned around an’ ran back in again.”

“He was going back for the other suitcase.”

“I know, an’ I thought while he’s gettin’ the second suitcase, I could just take the first one off his hands. Trunk was locked, but I could open it same way he did, pressin’ the release button in the glove compartment. ’Cause the car doors wasn’t locked.”

“I’m glad you didn’t try.”

“Well, I coulda done it, but say he come back and the suitcase ain’t there, what he gonna do? Go back and shoot you, most likely. So I figured that wasn’t too cool.”

“Good thinking.”

“Then I thought, if this here’s a movie, what I do is slip in the back an’ hunker down ‘tween the front an’ back seats. They be puttin’ the money in the trunk an’ sittin’ up front, so they ain’t even gone look in the back. Figured they go back to their house, or wherever they gone go, an’ when we got there I just slip out an’ call you up an’ tell you where I’m at. But then I thought, TJ, this ain’t no movie, an’ you too young to die.”

“I’m glad you figured that out.”

“ ‘Sides, maybe you don’t be at that same number, an’ then what do I do? So I wait, and he come back with the second suitcase, throw it in the trunk, an’ get in the car. An’ the other one, one who made the phone call, he come an’ get behind the wheel. And they drive off, an’ I slip back into the cemetery an’ catch up with everybody. Cemetery’s weird, man. I can see havin’ a stone, tells who’s underneath it, but some of ’em has these little houses an’ all, fancier than they had when they alive. Would you want somethin’ like that?”

“No.”

“Me neither. Just a little stone, don’t say nothin’ on it, but TJ.”

“No dates? No full name?”

He shook his head. “Just TJ,” he said. “An’ maybe my beeper number.”

Back on Colonial Road, Kenan got on the phone and tried to find a pizza place that was still open. He couldn’t, but it didn’t matter. Nobody was hungry.

“We ought to be celebrating,” he said. “We got the kid back, she’s alive. Some celebration we got here.”

“It’s a draw,” Peter said. “You don’t celebrate a tie score. Nobody wins and nobody shoots off firecrackers. Game ends in a tie, it feels worse than losing.”

“It’d feel a lot worse if the girl was dead,” Kenan said.

“That’s because this isn’t a football game, it’s real. But you still can’t celebrate, babe. The bad guys got away with the money. Does that makes you want to toss your hat in the air?”

“They’re not in the clear,” I put in. “It’ll take a day or two, that’s all. But they’re not going anywhere.”

Still, I didn’t feel like celebrating any more than anybody else did. Like any game that ended in a tie, this one left an aftertaste of missed opportunities. TJ thought he should have stowed away in the back of the Honda, or found some way to follow the car back to where it lived. Peter had had a couple of chances to drop Callander with a rifle shot, times when there would have been no danger to me or to the girl. And I could think of a dozen ways we could have made a try for the money. We’d done what we set out to do, but there should have been a way to do more.

“I want to call Yuri,” Kenan said. “Kid was a mess, she could barely walk. I think she lost more than her fingers.”

“I’m afraid you’re probably right.”

“They must have really done a number on her.” He jabbed at the buttons on the phone. “I don’t like to think about that because then I start thinking of Francey, and—” He broke off to say, “Uh, hello, is Yuri there? I’m sorry. I got the wrong number, I’m really sorry to disturb you.”

He broke the connection and sighed. “Hispanic woman, sounded like I woke her out of a sound sleep. God, I hate when that happens.”

I said, “Wrong numbers.”

“Yeah, I don’t know which is worse, to give or to receive. I feel like such an asshole disturbing somebody like that.”

“You had a couple of wrong numbers the day your wife was kidnapped.”

“Yeah, right. Like an omen, except that they didn’t seem particularly ominous at the time. Just a nuisance.”

“Yuri had a couple of wrong numbers this morning, too.”

“So?” He frowned, then nodded. “Them, you think? Calling to make sure if somebody was home? I suppose, but so what?”

“Would you use a pay phone?” They looked at me, lost. “Say you were going to make a call that would just play as a wrong number. You weren’t going to say anything and nobody would take any notice of the call. Would you bother to drive half a dozen blocks and spend a quarter in a pay phone? Or would you use your own phone?”

“I suppose I’d use my own, but—”

“So would I,” I said. I grabbed my notebook, looking for the sheet of paper Jimmy Hong had given me, the list of calls to the Khoury house. He had copied out all the calls starting at midnight, even though I had only needed the ones from the time of the initial ransom demand. I’d had the slip earlier that day, I’d looked for the laundromat phone number with the intention of calling TJ there, but where the hell had I put it?

I found it, unfolded it. “Here we are,” I said. “Two calls, both under a minute. One at nine-forty-four in the morning, the other at two-thirty in the afternoon. Calling phone is 243-7436.”

“Man,” Kenan said, “I just remember there were a couple of wrong numbers. I don’t know what time they came in.”

“But do you recognize the number?”