Elmore Leonard - Cat Chaser

They talked while they were getting dressed.

She told him the police were in and out of the house all day yesterday investigating the explosion, questioning her, the help, Andres, mostly Andres. Their tone wasn’t suspicious but their questions were, trying to find out what Andres was into, if Dominican revolutionary or anti-government factions had ever threatened him before. Moran let her tell what she knew, Mary standing at the mirror brushing her hair.

Then he told her about Jiggs Scully in the Mutiny Bar, and she put the brush down and stood very still. Moran ended with a flat statement.

“He knows Andres has at least a couple million hidden in the house. He wants us to tell him where it is. If we do he’ll go in, take the money and he’ll kill Andres, as a favor.”

She said, “A favor ,” wide-eyed.

“We sail off into the sunset and live happily ever after.”

The room was as silent as he could remember a room being silent, going back to when he was a little boy lying in bed during his afternoon nap, wide awake. Mary walked to a chair but didn’t sit down; she turned to Moran again. He was sitting on the side of the bed with a tennis shoe in his hand.

“I have to tell him,” Mary said.

He gave her time.

“You understand that, don’t you? I have to.”

“The only thing I’m sure of,” Moran said, “somebody’s trying to use us. A guy talks to me out of the side of his mouth like I’m one of the boys. Why? As far as he knows I’m a decent, law-abiding citizen. It’s true you and I happen to have something going-”

“That’s quaint, George. Something going.”

“Something special, soon to be-you know-out in the open, aboveboard. Let me just tell you the rest, okay? The question is, first, why would he think we’d go along?”

“That’s right, he’d be taking a chance,” Mary said.

“A big one. But let’s say we do. We tell Jiggs where the money’s hidden and close our eyes. What happens then?”

“You just said-he’ll kill Andres.”

“Are we positive?”

Mary frowned, shaking her head. “I don’t understand.”

“What if the whole thing’s your husband’s idea?”

She hesitated now. “You think Andres is using Scully?”

“You go to your husband and tell him his life’s in danger. What’s the first thing he asks you?”

“God, you’re right.”

“You didn’t hear it at the Dadeland shopping mall. But say you tell him,” Moran said, “and now it’s confirmed, Andres knows we’ve been seeing each other. What does he do then?” He saw a different look come into Mary’s eyes. “You know him better than I do, but he doesn’t seem the type that loses gracefully. What does he do to you when you tell him?”

Mary’s reaction surprised him: the look of calm that came into her eyes as she listened.

“You’re right, it sounds like him. It’s the roundabout way he thinks… the son of a bitch.” She sat down in the chair, thoughtful.

“But we aren’t sure,” Moran said. “There’s the matter of your dock blowing up. Would Andres go that far?”

Mary shook her head. “No, he’s not gonna do something that makes him look vulnerable. Unless-why would it have to be part of Andres’s scheme?”

“All I know is,” Moran told her, “Jiggs said he’d make the hit look political. Like some revolutionary group out to get your husband… But why does he tell me all this if there’s a good chance I’m gonna tell you and you’re gonna tell Andres?”

She said, “He must be awfully sure we’d go along. Or it’s worth the chance. He can always deny it. Which brings us back to the only question that means anything. Do I tell Andres or not?”

Mary looked like a young girl sitting in the chair, biting her lower lip now, though more preoccupied than frightened: an imaginative girl wondering how to tell her parents she was pregnant.

She said, “If something did happen to Andres…”

He said, “Mary, we don’t need help. We don’t have to hope he gets a heart attack or falls off his boat. All we have to do is walk away.”

She said, “I know. I’m not hoping for anything like that,” and looked at him with clear eyes. “But it would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

NOLEN AND RAFI HAD BEEN DRINKINGthe better part of two days and were both drunk when Moran found them in the early evening. Nolen was keeping it going. Moran saw it right away: Nolen had to stay up there because if he came down now he’d crash and burn.

They were having a private party in oceanfront Number One with scotch and rum, Coke cans, a bowl of watery ice and potato chips on the coffee table and the smell of marijuana in the room. There was no sign of Loret. They were wound-up drunk: Nolen bare to the waist, stoop-shouldered skin and bones, his slack cheeks sucked in on a joint; Rafi wearing a scarf rolled and tied as a headband, the ends hanging to his chest, his sporty Dominican shirt open all the way. Nolen was calling him Ché.

“You meet Ché? George, shake hands with Ché Amado, one of your premier fanatics, brought here by special request to combat the toadies of oligarchic imperialism, but don’t ask me what it means.”

“You didn’ know that,” Rafi said to Moran. Rafi sat slumped in a plastic chair, feet extended in glistening, patent-leather zip-up boots. “You think I come here to bite you for money. It work pretty good, didn’ it? I had you fool.”

“You had me fool, all right,” Moran said. “I thought you were just a pimp. Which one of you did the job on the boat dock?”

“That was him,” Rafi said, “he’s the powerman.” He squinted up at Moran and said, “What did you say before it?”

“That’s powderman,” Nolen said, “in the trade,” and gave Moran a sly look. “I hear we’re in business. Is that right? I heard it from a certain party, but I’d rather hear it from you… Where you going?”

Moran got a glass from the kitchen and came back to sit at the opposite end of the sofa from Nolen. He poured himself a scotch; he would probably need it.

“You’re over your head,” Moran said. He drank the scotch and poured another one.

Nolen was grinning. “So what else is new?”

“Stick to acting.”

“It’s what I’m doing, man. What’s the difference?”

Aw shit, Moran thought.

He wondered why he’d ever had a good feeling about Nolen, why he’d been comfortable with him and went for that grunts together, old war buddies grinning their way through life bullshit; he wasn’t anything like Nolen. Nolen was pathetic trying hard to be tragic and any more of him, Moran knew, would be a bigger pain in the ass than he could bear. He wanted to hear about it though, what they were into. He would hardly have to encourage them and it would come sliding out of their mouths with alcohol fumes.

“What’d you use,” Moran said to Nolen, “on the boat dock?”

Nolen said, “On the dock?” focusing his eyes. “I was gonna go with ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, little dynamite, and light up the sky. But if these people’re suppose to be pros, I thought no, you gotta go with a nonhydroscopic plastique, you dig? Slip in there in a Donzi, half-speed all the way. Me and my shipmate, this spic that steared-excuse me, Ché-guy was wearing sunglasses at night. You head due south from near Dinner Key where we launched till you get the Cape Florida light off your port bow, then hang a right and there you are. Drift in… I’ve already run the det-cord through the blocks, they got adhesive backing on ’em now, stick ’em flat under the boards but use a linear-shape charge on the pilings so it’ll cut ’em off clean. Twelve pounds of plastique, could’ve done the house. I’m scared of timers, so we drifted down by Matheson Hammock and I blew it remote control.” Nolen made an elaborate exploding sound on the roof of his mouth with his jaw clenched. “The dock’s gone.”