Richard Patterson - The Lasko Tangent

“I’m Christopher Paget, from the ECC. I’ve been looking for you.”

“My God,” he exclaimed, and his tone wasn’t grateful. I looked him over then. Tracy’s picture was a good likeness. He was tan and wiry, with black curly hair and chiseled features. The plaid slacks and oxford cloth shirt went with the expensive loafers. A well-preserved college boy from the early sixties, catnip for gullible women. What was wrong in him began in the myopic foxiness of the green eyes and bled subtly into his features, making them spoiled and vaguely weak.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he blurted.

I hadn’t expected this. I remembered the running footsteps in the corridor. “Why don’t you tell me on the way out?”

“Where are we going?”

“To the police.”

He shook his head. “Look, if I keep my head down, I won’t get hurt.” The words mixed fear and calculation. “You’re the one who got me into this mess.”

Tension raised my voice. “We’ll argue that later. Come on.”

Martinson’s hands clamped the chair as if it were a life raft. “They’ll kill me. They’ve already killed Alec Lehman.”

That stopped me for a moment. But there wasn’t time for questions. “Then you’re in a jam,” I said, “because now that I’ve found you, they’ll do just that.”

He hesitated, stiff with fear and resentment. I grabbed his forearm and pulled him up. He stumbled with me out the door, gaping at the bleak empty corridors. His voice was a savage whine. “Did Tracy tell you where to look?” I nodded and pulled him with me. “Stupid bitch,” he mumbled.

My grip tightened. “You know, Martinson, rescuing you is a real disappointment.” But I understood, in a way. He was a frightened man. I was frightened too.

The walk up the corridor seemed treadmill slow. The nurses’ station was empty. I looked quickly around. Except for Martinson, the wing was vacant.

Then I heard a drum roll of footsteps. A clump of figures appeared suddenly at the end of the corridor. I picked out Loring and the guard and two large men I didn’t know. The other man was tall and broad-built. Lasko. Whatever Martinson knew had flushed him out.

I felt Martinson blanch. “Jesus.”

I tried to put up a front. “Just let me handle this,” I said, without looking at him. Lasko was standing ahead of the group, waiting. Ahead must be the only way out.

We were within thirty feet of them now. Lasko’s face was a mask of controlled anger. Something I didn’t quite understand had pushed his plans awry, and it showed in his face. The two large men fanned out to either side of him, blocking our way. Loring and the guard hung back as if lost.

We got within ten feet and stopped. Lasko stared at us, eyes hard and calculating. The man to his left was bald, and watched us with a greyhound’s watery eyes. The other man was younger, with a mustache and thick brown hair. I wondered if they had guns. No one moved. I wished fiercely that I hadn’t come.

Lasko’s voice rang commandingly in the hall. “You’re very persistent, Mr. Paget, and you don’t pay attention when you should. But you’re not leaving.”

My brain pumped words in some panicky reflex. “We are unless you’re planning a mass murder.” I didn’t like my voice. My mouth felt artificially dry, as if the saliva had been sucked out.

A spark of interest crossed Lasko’s face. “All right. You’ve got my attention.” The carefully controlled voice made it sound as if we were discussing a business decision.

“You should have killed Martinson in the first place. But now I know what he knows.” Which wasn’t true. Lasko’s eyes snapped toward Martinson. But Martinson didn’t, or couldn’t, say anything. “So when you kill Martinson, you have to kill me too. And there’s a Boston cop who knows where I am.”

I shot a glance at Loring. He gaped at the word “murder” like a man listening to a foreign language, hoping he had somehow misheard. I went on. “You can’t trust Loring either. Kill us and the cops will be here tomorrow, poking around. He’s got his license to consider, not to mention his freedom.”

My voice had turned advisory. Lasko paused, as if he could hear my words coming from Catlow’s mouth. The two men at his side were cool and relaxed, waiting for orders. It could go either way, I thought. I was feeling the cold reality; for whatever reason, Lasko wanted us dead.

Lasko picked for words that could never hurt him. “You’re talking nonsense, Mr. Paget,” he said casually. “I doubt the people in your agency have ever authorized this.”

I pointed to the guard. He froze in stupefaction. “The cops will track him down too. So I figure you have to kill four people anyway. I probably left someone out. I saw a couple of nurses a while ago.”

Lasko’s eyes turned inward, as if he were deciding whether to wait. He said nothing more; there were witnesses all around him.

I started walking, steering Martinson to the right. Five feet between me and the mustached man. My stomach felt empty. The mustached man looked back, hand in his pocket, his eyes completely blank. He stepped back three feet, to see Lasko and me at once. We kept moving. The man took in Lasko with the corner of his eyes. Then a signal moved through them.

We reached him. His hand stirred in his pocket. Then he turned sideways. We passed him and turned the corner, heading for the entrance.

Loring stood to our left in an angular slouch, like some lone desiccated bird about to become extinct. We swept by. He stared at his feet.

The inner set of doors was a few feet ahead. Silence behind us. Our footsteps echoed in the corridor. Martinson looked white. My back burned with imagined gunshots.

We burst through the first set of doors. They closed behind us with a slow sigh. I grabbed the outer door. It opened. Fresh air splashed our faces.

We walked to the car and drove away.

Twenty-Nine

“Jesus,” Martinson kept saying. I steered back onto Route 9, my mind on automatic pilot. My hands were clammy, and my mind was numb with disbelief. Martinson was shivering uncontrollably next to me, like a malaria victim.

We rolled through Brookline toward Boston. It was still light out. I was glad; I would have flinched at each taillight in the dark. Martinson was jabbering this and that, about to break into a talking jag. I reached for the car radio, trying to collect my thoughts, but all I got was a folk song that was going nowhere and feeling sorry for itself doing it. I switched it off.

“How did Lasko get there?” Martinson’s voice was blaming me.

“Loring kept me waiting long enough. He probably called him.”

“Then why did he let us go?”

“Two possibilities. One is that Lasko decided to chance beating the Lehman thing and whatever you know, rather than kill someone else. Notice he didn’t say an incriminating word back there. The other is that he’ll take a shot at us, but away from witnesses, so he has some chance to walk away. I wouldn’t mind if you’d keep an eye out the back window.”

“For what?” he asked anxiously.

“For whatever looks like it’s following us.”

“Jesus,” he said again. He turned sideways and rested his chin on top of the car seat. His eyes seemed to strain clear back to the sanitarium.

“What happened?” I asked, as much for diversion as anything else.

“When?”

“Between St. Maarten and now?”

“What’s today?”

“Monday.”

His eyes crinkled. “Last Tuesday morning two guys who were with Lasko show up…”

I interrupted. “The ones from the sanitarium?”

“No, a crew-cut guy and one with a big, puffy nose. They said you were looking for me about the Carib deal. I asked why.” His voice cut loose. “They said never mind why-that I had to take off, right then. I said I didn’t want to-that I wanted to know what the story was. They said Lasko would talk to me later-not to make trouble. I said I wanted to call him. Then they told me I was in trouble too, if I didn’t move. Yeah, and they threatened my wife.” The last sounded like an afterthought. I suspected she always had been.