Patrick Quinlan - Smoked

Cruz went on. “Do me a favor, all right? We need a place to meet, a public type place, a crowded restaurant, say. We’re there, you walk in, sit down at our table, your friend gets up and walks out. And we need to know where you’ll be staying tonight, a place we can reach you. Got any ideas? We’re open to ideas right now. Ways we can make this happen without too much pain.”

“There’s a Best Western in South Portland,” Smoke heard himself say. “It’s a motel right by an exit off the highway. There’s a big restaurant there, Governor’s, a lot of people go there for breakfast.”

“Yeah? How’s the food?”

“You eat eggs? Bacon? It’s a buffet.”

“Okay, that sounds good. Best Western, South Portland. Governor’s Restaurant.” There was a pause as Smoke imagined Cruz writing this down on a napkin or an envelope. “Your friend know how to get there?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, then. Take a room at the Best Western. We’ll contact you there tomorrow, or maybe later tonight. You won’t know. If you’re not there when we call, I guess you know what happens. The deal will be off. The trade won’t happen. Do you know what I mean?”

“I do.” The trade was Smoke for Lola. That’s what they were offering. “Is the trade for both of them?”

“Sure, if you like.”

It didn’t sound right. He didn’t know whether to believe them or not. Lola and Pamela could both be dead already.

“Put her on the phone.”

“Who’s that?”

“You know.”

“Tomorrow.”

Smoke shook his head, as though Cruz could see that. “Not tomorrow, now.”

“Okay, that’s enough chat. Never know who’s listening nowadays. Do me that little favor I mentioned, will you? Wouldn’t want anything to get in the way.”

Smoke was about to say something else.

The line went dead.

He stood there with the phone in his hand for several minutes. Out the back window, and far away, a boat went by on the dark water. He couldn’t see the boat at all. He could tell it was there by the red running light at its stern.

The phone started buzzing violently. “If you’d like to make a call,” a robot woman said. “Please hang up and try again. If you’d like to make a call…”

Smoke hung up.

Shit.

He walked through the rooms absently, checking out the rest of the apartment. Shadows loomed all around him. No one was here. Pamela wasn’t here. Whatever they had done with her, they hadn’t left her behind.

He went into Lola’s room and the life-size poster of the black tennis player startled him. It hung there over the bed, accusing him. You murdered her. You did it. There was nothing he could say in his defense.

He kept an extra cane here at the apartment. He rooted around in the closet and found it at the back, behind a pile of clothes. That, at least was something.

He went back into the dining area and sat down again.

Smoke looked at the cane in his hands. It was knobby wood, more of a walking stick than a cane. Along its shaft was a button, camouflaged to look like a part of the cane itself. You’d have to look closely to even notice it.

Hell, you’d have to know it was there.

He pressed the button and the bottom twelve inches of the cane detached and fell off. A sharp stiletto spike six inches long protruded from the end of the shaft that he held. A solid jab with that would piece anyone’s heart, even big, bad Moss.

Smoke looked at his large workman’s hands.

He had the strength. He could do it.

“You see, I don’t often hit girls,” Moss was saying. “I don’t like doing it.”

They were driving north along Interstate 95, Moss’s big hands gripping the wheel. All around them, the darkness had closed in. Cruz marveled at how the city simply ended and the country began. There was nothing to see out here but trees. It was like driving off a cliff into complete darkness.

Well, they’d let all that smoke clear back there, and hide the girls somewhere Dugan couldn’t try to get at them. In the morning, they could go and collect Dugan, provided the cops hadn’t already done so. Or they could make Dugan wait a little while. Fear him up that they were going to kill his girls.

In fact, Cruz wasn’t sure what to do next.

He thought of the money again.

How many times? How many times had he put down someone who thought they could run? Too many. No amount of money was enough. Certainly not a couple mil.

He glanced sidelong at Moss. That thick, solid skull. It wouldn’t stop a bullet.

Would it?

“So,” Moss said. “You know, the girl is kicking me and hitting me, and I’m not fighting back.” He shrugged. “You know?”

Cruz lit a cigarette. “I know. But you think we ought to shoot this other one.”

Moss looked at him. “Don’t you?”

It was Cruz’s turn to shrug.

“Anyway, it’s one thing to hit a girl,” Moss said. “It’s another thing to shoot somebody. Shooting’s easier.”

“Very true.”

A half-hour passed, each lost in his own thoughts. They got off the highway and cruised slowly down the dark and quiet exit ramp and along a feeder road. There was not another car on the road. They turned at an intersection, empty except for a hanging streetlight that blinked red in all four directions. The area was deserted this late in the tourist season. The road ahead was winding, two lane blacktop. Moss drove along between dense stands of forest. Cruz wasn’t sure what he was looking for – he figured he’d know it when he saw it.

And see it he did.

“There,” he said. “Stop in there.”

A sign said: COUNTRY HOME MOTEL amp; COTTAGES – Open Through Thanksgiving.

A long winding driveway led up from the road to the motel compound.

“Let’s go up there and see if it’s quiet.”