Джо Горес - Dead Man

But it got him a rep. What cemented it was a Mafia don’s private pilot who had testified against his boss and had gone into the federal Witness Relocation Program two years before. In seventeen days, Dain found him on a fishing boat in Alaska.

After that he had more of his curiously specialized work than he could handle, and in the intervening months had really become much more the image he projected: harder, colder, more indifferent to the fate of those he found. Still plenty of sleepless nights, but not over them. They were all scum. Just not the scum he was seeking.

Then, a year later almost to the day, Dain’s game began — although he didn’t know it at the time.

It was 9:01 a.m. in Chicago on a bright glary summer morning headed toward the century mark by midday. An early-thirties man went into the First Chicago Bank of Commerce on South Wacker a few blocks from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He was slender, weak-chinned, bespectacled, suited, carrying an attaché case. His eyes were close-set, which weakened the face even more.

He went to the window with SAFE DEPOSIT BOXES over it. Unlike the tellers’ windows, there was no line. Holding a key in his hand, he fidgeted until a round-faced girl in a frilly blouse came over to use her twangy Midwest accent on him.

“May I help you, sir?”

He displayed the key. “Six-two-three-eight.”

The teller riffled the signature cards. Took one out.

“Adelle Lorimer or James Zimmer are authorized to—”

“James Zimmer — obviously.”

His chuckle was so nervous it was almost a cough. She compared his signature with that on file with the bank, then pushed the buzzer to let Zimmer into the vault area. They went through the double-key ritual. Zimmer shut himself into one of the private cubicles with the long oblong green metal box. As he opened both it and his attache case, he had to wipe sweat from his face with his display handkerchief.

From the box he took a dictionary-thick sheaf of bearer bonds. From the attaché case, a much smaller stack of bonds. Laboriously and individually he checked their numbers against the larger stack, winnowing bonds from it until apart from the original he also had two small stacks that were, bond for bond, identical. He substituted new for old, returned the doctored sheaf to the not-so-safe deposit box, put the originals removed from it into his attaché case.

Zimmer emerged from the bank moving briskly and with confidence, case in hand. Starting to cross a quarter block short of the crosswalk, he had to wait for a grimy Cicero bus to pass. A tip-nosed Irish meter maid following the bus and blue-chalking tires from her three-wheeler yelled at him.

“Hey — you!” She revved her engine beside him a couple of times. “Didja really think you could get away with that?” Zimmer stared at her through spectacles that, luckily for him, darkened in bright light so she could not see his wide and terrified eyes. “Didja ever hear of crosswalks?”

“No, I... I mean, yes, sorry, Officer, I was just...”

But she was gone. The minute hand of a big wall clock on a brick building across the street jerked solidly forward to 9:24. At the corner he crossed with the light, turned right, trying to regain his casual, jaunty stride; but the encounter had left the hand holding the attache case white-knuckled with tension.

He looked around rather furtively, then ducked into an alley. A kid carrying a cardboard tray of Styrofoam cups had to make a matador-with-the-bull move, the cover came off a cup to slop hot coffee over his wrist.

“Jesus Christ, man, why don’t ya look where ya...”

Zimmer, oblivious, scuttled down the midblock alley at the far end of which a dirty and dented five-year-old red Porsche was parked facing the street. A lush-bodied platinum blonde in her mid-twenties, exotic as a tropical bird, was adding blood-red lipstick to full, sensual lips by the tipped-down interior mirror. Her dark and magnificent eyes were almost obliterated by too much mascara and liner, but even so she was vivid, alive.

A swarthy short-order cook came from a greasy spoon’s kitchen door to dump something into a garbage pail with a nasty splashing plop, and the passing Zimmer leaped two feet in the air. The blonde shook her head at his antics in the driver’s side mirror, pressed a Kleenex between her lips to blot them.

Zimmer got in beside her and put his attaché case on the floor. Now that danger seemed past he was high on excitement, a hell of a fellow.

“Smooth as fucking silk.” His lips curved around the dirty word his squeaky voice didn’t quite fit.

“My mighty hero of romance,” she said lightly.

Her irony was lost on Zimmer. He leaned over to kiss her. She pushed his face away with the back of her hand.

“What’s the matter with you, Vangie?”

“What’s the matter with you? This was the easy part.”

Her skirt had ridden up as she worked the pedals, exposing long, beautifully muscled dancer’s thighs in sheer black pantyhose. She tapped the horn twice as she edged the low red car out across the sidewalk. Zimmer, the coolest dude on earth, put his hand up between her legs.

“In an hour, sweet thing, I’m going to—”

Vangie slammed on the brakes so hard he bounced off the dashboard, thus effectively removing the offending hand. She glared at him with glacial eyes.

“Touch me again when I don’t want you to, sweet thing, and you’re going to need a prosthesis to pee.”

A black teenager just coming out of a clothing shop with a mop, pail and squeegee heard Vangie’s voice carry through the open window and started to laugh. She winked at him, then goosed it to send the beat-up little red Porsche zipping from the alley mouth.

Zimmer was angered by the black boy’s laughter. As Vangie skillfully threaded the car through Loop traffic under the cool shadow of the El on Van Buren, he sneered, “No guts, baby? Shit, I did it, while you sat here peeing your pants! I’m—”

“Just what did you do, Jimmy?”

“I ripped off two million bucks in bearer bonds from T. J. L. fucking Maxton!” he exclaimed with defiant triumph.

She looked over at him and her face softened.

“Oh Jimmy-honey, don’t you get it? When Maxton realizes what has happened here and picks up his telephone, somebody very good at finding people is going to be on the other end.”

Dain still lived in the modest bungalow in Tarn Valley, but now also leased a convenient loft over a dilapidated pier next to the firehouse on the San Francisco waterfront. The loft had a bed, dresser, wardrobe in one corner, bathroom in another, a kitchen in between. At 8:30 A.M., two hours after he had fallen asleep, the phone jerked him upright out of nightmare.

Albie’s legs were blasted back down the hall out of sight as the door frame was splintered and pocked and ripped by the edges of the shot pattern

His shoulders slumped. His eyes became human again.

“Bad one, Shenz,” he said.

Shenzie the wonder cat, his head sideways on the pillow and his front paws over the top of the blanket like a sleeping person, got up with a huge jaw-creaking yawn, stretched fore and aft, and stalked off in search of kibble as the phone rang again. Dain had not heard him purr since the day, five years before, when he’d been dropped off at Randy Solomon’s Victorian.

Dain blew out a big whoosh! of breath, fumbled for the phone with one hand while dashing sweat from his face with the other.

“Dain.”

“Sherman here. A call just came for you.”

Dain sighed. “One hour.”

He stood. He was nude, lean but tremendously muscular, his right shoulder, upper chest, and side of his neck peppered with small round white marks. On his left arm, rib cage, flank, and thigh were innumerable well-healed surgical scars.