Stuart Woods - Dirt

“No.”

“Me, I wouldn’t go after these guys without a piece. You shouldn’t either.”

“See you, Dino.” Stone punched out, put away the phone, got off the West Side Highway at 48th Street, drove over to 9th Avenue, and headed downtown, trying to stay in the bus tracks.

“Gee, I’m not sure,” the man behind the desk said, looking at the ad Stone had ripped out of Vanity Fair.

Stone flashed the badge. “You don’t want to be thought of as harboring a fugitive, do you?”

The man shook his head and checked his guest list. “He’s in ten-oh-one.”

“Under what name?”

“Jeremy Spencer.”

“Is there somebody bunking with him?”

“No, he checked in alone last week, and I haven’t seen him with anybody else, except a girl or two. They always leave in the morning.”

“Passkey,” Stone said.

“Not a chance,” the desk clerk replied. “Not without a search warrant. I’m not getting into that kind of shit with my boss.”

Stone glared at him. “Okay, I’m going up there, and if you call up and tell him I’m coming, you’re going to find yourself in more shit than you would have ever believed possible.”

The man held up his hands. “Okay, okay.”

Stone took the elevator to the tenth floor, trembling with anticipation. He was looking forward to meeting Mr. Thomas Bruce. The door was at the end of the hall, at the back of the building. The Chelsea was an old hotel with a reputation for harboring rebels, literary and rock. It had been fixed up yet again, and the carpet was new. The hallway wasn’t very wide, though; that was good. Noting that there was no peephole, Stone rapped at the door.

“Yeah, who is it?” a muffled voice replied.

“Bellman. Got a Federal Express for you.”

“You sure you got the right room? Who’s it for?”

“Jeremy Spencer; from somebody named Burch, in Rahway, New Jersey.” Stone braced himself against the opposite wall as he heard the door chain rattle. As soon as he saw the knob turn, he pushed off the wall and threw all his weight behind a kick at the door.

His timing was perfect. The door caught the man in the face and sent him flying backward across the room, and Stone was right on top of him. He held a forearm against the man’s neck. “Mr. Dryer, I presume,” he said, applying more pressure. “Or maybe I should say Mr. Bruce.”

Something hard hit Stone on the back of the head, but he didn’t pass out. Somebody grabbed him from behind and yanked him to his feet, pinning his arms behind him. Stone struggled to stay conscious as he watched Tommy Bruce get to his feet.

“You son of a bitch,” Bruce said, throwing a right to Stone’s gut.

“And I always thought I was such a nice guy,” Stone managed to say between gasps for breath.

Bruce hit him high on his cheekbone, snapping his head around.

Still, Stone remained conscious.

Bruce cupped a hand under his chin and raised his head. “How’d you find me?” he demanded.

“Phone book,” Stone said.

Bruce looked past him and said, “Hey, Charlie, meet Stone Barrington, the comic.” He hit Stone on the other side of the head. “Did I ever tell you I fucked his girlfriend?”

“Oh, yeah, the lovely Arrington,” Charles Bruce said from somewhere behind Stone’s swimming head.

“And I fucked your sister,” Stone said.

“What did you say?”

“Oh, yeah; the lovely Lou.”

Bruce hit him again, and this time Stone started to go dark. His last memory was Tommy Bruce’s shoe, coming at his head.

He came to in an ambulance, hurting everywhere. He tried to raise a hand to his face and discovered that his arms were strapped down. A paramedic was taking his blood pressure, and a cop dozed on a bench beside the litter. “Hey,” Stone said.

The cop’s head snapped around. “Huh?”

“Where we going?”

“Bellevue,” the cop said.

Stone winced as they hit a bump. “Let’s make it Lenox Hill,” he said. “They know me there.”

Tommy and Charlie Bruce checked into the Mansfield Hotel on West 44th Street. It was a small hostelry, originally designed as an apartment hotel for well-to-do bachelors, as was its larger counterpart, the Royalton, farther down the block toward 6th Avenue, and It had recently been remodeled.

“I just don’t get it,” Charlie said. “How the fuck could he find us? How could he know who we are?”

This annoyed Tommy, who was accustomed to knowing everything. “He knows Louise, too.”

“You should have let me kill him, talking like that about Louise.”

Tommy whipped out a cell phone and called Rahway.

“Hello?” Sleepy voice.

“Hi, Sis,” Tommy said. “You sound as though you’ve been well fucked.”

“What?” She was awake now.

“You told him where to find us.”

“I most certainly did not. I told him nothing.”

“Tell me the truth.”

“I am telling you the truth. He asked; I didn’t tell him.”

Tommy thought for a minute. “Did you write anything down?”

Her silence answered the question.

“Did you fall asleep after he fucked you?”

More silence.

“He looked around the house, didn’t he?”

Still silence.

“You still meticulously keep your address book, don’t you?”

“All right,” she said, “he looked around the house; I caught him at it.”

“How did he find you?”

“I have no idea.”

“Come on, Louise, think. He must have said something about why he was there.”

“He said he was a lawyer, but he wasn’t there as a lawyer. He was looking for you for personal reasons.”

“Did he say what he meant about that?”

“He said you stole his watch. Also, that you’d stolen things from other people. Is that true, Tommy?”

Tommy’s turn to be silent.

“Speak to me.”

“I had reasons to do what I did,” he said finally. “We’re right on the verge of something really big.”

“What is it? What are you up to?”

“Let’s just say that Charlie and I possess some very valuable information, and it’s going to make us a lot of money.”

“You’re going to end up in jail, Tommy, just like Charlie. You two are more alike than I ever knew.”

“Listen, if he turns up there again, I want you to call me.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m going to give you a telephone number, and I don’t want you to write it down; memorize it. It’s a cellular phone.”

“All right.”

He gave her the number. “Have you got that?”

She repeated it to him. “Listen, I want you to understand something.”

“What’s that?”

“I live on alimony and child support; I have no other funds.”

“So?”

“So I don’t want you to expect me to raise bail or money for lawyers for either of you. I did that once, when I was married, and it was thrown up to me for years by my husband, who had to come up with the money. I’m not going to do it again. So if you two get yourselves arrested, I’ll read about it in the papers, but I don’t want to hear from you. Got that?”

“I got it, Louise. You’re a great sister.”

“Better than you deserve,” she said, then she hung up.

“I’m hungry,” Charlie said. “We didn’t get any lunch.”

“There’s an Italian place down the block,” Tommy replied. “I saw it from the cab. Come on.”

Gaetano Calabrese checked his tie in the mirror, then turned to his boss. “Take a picture of me, okay?” He fished the Instamatic out of his locker and handed it to his headwaiter, who laughed and took his picture.

Gaetano had been in the country for seven months, and he had worked every day of it as a busboy. This was his first day as a waiter, and he was enjoying the tips. He worked days, and in the evenings, he ran numbers for a guy in his neighborhood. Gaetano fished a photograph out of his wallet and looked at it again; his boss had given it to him the night before. Five hundred bucks, that was what it was worth; he memorized the face and put it back in his wallet.