Donald Westlake - Smoke

"How long?"

"Maybe a week, maybe less, maybe more."

"Precision," Leethe said, with another brief faux smile. "How much will all this cost?"

"Under a grand."

Leethe considered. He finished his Perrier. He said, "And how much of that will be paid by my partner?"

Barney stared at him. He couldn't believe this guy. "Are you feelin all right?" he demanded. "Maybe it's past your bedtime. Lemme make it easy on you. Just nod your head if I got the okay to spend the grand."

28

Sunday evening, they had a fire. They didn't need a fire, the Sunday of the last week in June, but if you're going to rent a house in the country, and if that house has a fireplace, and if it has a stack of firewood outside under a black plastic sheet against the back wall, it doesn't much matter if it's August, you've got to have a fire.

Also, as Freddie pointed out, "You need more warmth in a room when you're naked."

"You could put some clothes on, Freddie."

"If I put on a shirt and pants," he answered, accurately, "you'll get upset unless I put on one of the heads and a pair of rubber gloves and then some socks and shoes and—"

"Okay, okay. We'll have a fire. Let me do it!" she cried, as a log started to fly all by itself across the room toward the fireplace.

This was long enough after dinner for Freddie to be completely invisible again, and there was still bluish-pink light to be seen through the windows in the sky outside, above the black soft masses of the trees. In the country, their patterns were changing, they were going to sleep earlier, waking up earlier, living an entirely different life. Call Me Tom had given them a list of nearby — if fifteen miles could be considered nearby — shops and stores, and they'd done their exploring, taking life easy, Freddie not even shoplifting, though in these country shops you hardly had to be invisible to walk out with half their stock. There were places in the little towns to rent videotapes, and the house had a big television set and a working VCR — even the clock in it worked, to show the advantage of renting from a scientist — so in the evenings they could watch movies, except tonight they were having a fire.

A nice one, too, if Peg did say so herself, having done the whole thing and then come back across the room to admire her handiwork. Sitting there on the deep sofa, lights out, rich sky colors in black-framed rectangles at the windows, snuggled against Freddie (it was okay if she didn't look), she gazed into the twisting flames and said, "Freddie, this is pretty okay."

"I kind of like it," Freddie agreed.

"The only question—"

"I know."

"What do you—"

"The cop."

"That's it."

"Here's the way I see it," Freddie told her, adjusting his arm more comfortably around her (she didn't look). "This cop, that you say his name is Barney something—

"That's what the lawyer called him."

"It could still be true, though. Okay, Barney's a real cop, with all that power, and that was probably a real warrant he showed you, but what I think is, I think he isn't working as a cop. I think he's rented himself out to that lawyer—"

"The lawyer was the guy in charge," Peg agreed, "when they were at our place."

"Right. And the lawyer's working for the doctors."

"Do doctors have that kind of clout?" Peg asked. "That they can get a lawyer that bosses cops around?"

"These aren't regular doctors," Freddie pointed out. "These are research doctors. Who knows who they got behind them? The CIA, maybe, or the Republican National Committee, or some oil sheik."

"Scary people."

"Which is why we want to stay away from them. Keep out of their sight."

"Easy for you to say."

"The question is," Freddie said, ignoring that, "what's gonna happen next with this cop and this lawyer?"

"They know we're up here someplace," Peg reminded him. "Someplace around the Rhinebeck railroad station."

"Which I'm not worried about," Freddie said, "if the cop's working on his own. If he can send out a flyer on us, that's different. Then we might actually have to leave here."

"Oh, Freddie! Don't even say it!"

"We still have to think it, Peg. We don't wanna be sitting here like this, cozy and romantic in front of the fire, and outside a SWAT team's surrounding the house."

Peg stared at the darkening shapes of the windows, her eyes wide in the firelight. "Oh, my God, Freddie, do you think it's possible?"

"Not this quick. Maybe not at all."

"But — what are we gonna do?"

"I tell you what," Freddie said. "Tomorrow's Monday. If this Barney the cop is on official business, if he's after me because there's a warrant out on me or something, those doctors swore out something against me, though I doubt it, but if that's the case—"

"Yes? Yes?"

"By tomorrow," Freddie said, "they'll have the bulletin with my name on it at all the police stations around here, and the state trooper barracks, and all the rest of it. So I'll go to one of those places and have a look."

"Freddie!" Peg said, and forgot, and looked at him — at the sofa, that is — then quickly looked at the fire again. "Could you do that?"

"Peg, I can do anything. That's the upside of this business. I know there's problems and all that with this invisibility thing, but Peg, you know, when it comes right down to it, I can do anything I want."

"I guess that's true."

"So if my name isn't there, on the be-on-the-lookout-for list, then everything's fine. Barney'll never find us here on his own."

"So we're safe."

"Yes." Freddie squeezed her more tightly. "Peg," he said.

"Yes?"

"Close your eyes now, Peg."

"What? Oh, sure."

29

When folks around Dudley said that Geoff Wheedabyx wore a whole lot of different hats, they meant it literally. Geoff lived in the old Wheedabyx place that had been built by his great-great-grandfather along the Albany-Boston road back in the 1850s, when there was still iron under this land (great-great-grandpa was the mine owner) and when all this countryside around here was farms and woods. Some members of the Wheedabyx clan — particularly the ones who had moved away to California — were still sore that the town that had grown up around great-great-grandpa's place was called Dudley and not Wheedabyx, but the fact was the Dudley farm had comprised over seven hundred acres, while Great-great-grandpa never had more than eleven acres around his house, a parcel which in any case he'd bought from the Dudleys.

The Albany-Boston road was now Market Street, the only east-west thoroughfare in the village of Dudley. The iron under the ground was long gone, turned into hard round balls and fired southward in the 1860s, and the farms were recently gone, turned into suburban developments and weekend homes and back into woods, but the Dudley descendants were still here, in and around their namesake town, and the Wheedabyx descendants were represented mainly these days by Geoff, who wore all those hats.

They were hung usually on pegs in his office, that being the big room at the left when you came in the front door. Originally that room had been the best parlor, unused except for holidays and family reunions and visits from the pastor, and at later times it had been a sickroom, whenever there was a Wheedabyx in residence too far gone to make it up the stairs, or sometimes a formal dining room, though too far from the kitchen, but now it was Geoff's office, where, on pegs high on the side wall opposite the entrance doorway, hung his many hats.

Here are the hats, from the left: volunteer fireman's helmet, with CHIEF emblazoned on the front, and goggles and mask and straps dangling from it; yellow construction hard hat, with WHEEDABYX BUILDERS in blue letters on the right side, being the small construction company Geoff ran and spent most of his time at, hammer in hand; white helmet with built-in walkie-talkie and AMBULANCE in red letters across the front, which he wore when driving for the Roe-Jan Volunteer Ambulance Service; dark blue graduation-type cap with tassel, worn when singing with the Unitarian choir (he wasn't a Unitarian, but it was a good place to meet girls); serious black fedora for use at weddings and funerals and outdoor speech-making (by others); and dark blue military officer-style police chief's hat, with silver badge and black hard brim, which is why we're here.