Thomas Perry - Vanishing Act

"Are you sure they’d know about Jerry’s father?" she asked.

"I know you’re not from Chicago, but trust me," Harry said. "Not knowing about Mr. Cappadocia is like saying, ’You mean Nancy Sinatra has a father?’ "

"So they’re probably looking for you too."

"As soon as they reload."

"What do you want to do?"

"I want to disappear for a little while," he said. "I don’t know who these two guys are, so I can’t get the police off my back by telling them, and I certainly can’t get Mr. C. off my back. And if I’m right, these two guys were not working on their own. Somebody hired them to kill Jerry C. In fact, this is the only bright spot."

"This is a bright spot?" she asked.

"For me it is. These days my standards are lower than other people’s. I figure the reason to hit Jerry is somebody wants to take over the Cappadocia operations. If that somebody now makes a move on Jerry’s father or goes around trying to slide Cappadocia businesses onto their own inventory, the somebody gets a name. Then I got nothing to tell anybody that they don’t know already. There’s no reason to put my feet in a meat grinder to ask me questions, and no reason to cut my head off to keep me from answering them."

As Jane brought it all back, this was the part that came back to her most vividly. Harry was only going to have to disappear for a little while. She could see him saying it, his face haggard and hopeful, like the face of a flood victim saying the rain had to stop soon. It was Harry at his most basic.

Harry had shown up at her door with nothing to offer except the story about Alfred Strongbear. The two robbers had left no money for him, not even the table stakes for the final poker game. He had tried to make up for it with expert advice. He once asked if she liked horses, and she had answered, "Yes," before she realized that he had said "the horses." "Never bet on anything less than a twenty-to-one shot," he advised. "It’s not worth your time. You can’t make anything. The secret is, the numbers fool people into thinking that handicapping is an exact science. No expert can figure it that close. When a horse opens at twenty-to-one, all they’re saying is that it’s a long shot. Fact is, it’s probably ten-to -one, or even eight-to-one unless it’s got three legs. One race in ten or fifteen, the others all go out and trip over their shoelaces." Harry had spent his life convincing himself that the long shots were going to come in. After she had studied him for a time, she understood that this was because he identified with them. If people had been assigned odds the way racehorses were, Harry would have been a twenty-to-one shot. She had an intuition that Harry was going to have to stay under longer than a little while, so she had given him a cover that would hold up. That had been five years ago.

Felker had gotten the essential parts of the story right, the ones Harry would have told a cop to get him to help. There was an account of the murder vague enough to reassure the cop that Harry didn’t know the kinds of details that would make it worth the cop’s while to put him in a cell, but vivid enough to convince him of what would happen to Harry if he did.

She was feeling a very strong impulse to believe Felker. It was just like Harry to have said Alfred Strongbear had given him forty thousand dollars instead of five thousand, and where would any of the story have come from if Harry hadn’t told him? And then there was the way he told it. He had listened to Harry’s voice, and she could tell that he liked Harry, thought he was funny. Maybe Harry was safe. Maybe this one was another like Harry, a man nobody was willing to take in and protect because he wasn’t exactly an innocent but who wasn’t a monster, either. The missing parts, the ones Felker didn’t know or didn’t remember, made it seem more likely. Harry had asked Alfred Strongbear, "If you want a mustache, why don’t you just grow one?" The old man had told him, "It comes in too thin. People would know I’m an Indian."

Jane said, "All right. You can get up now." She relaxed her arm to let the gun muzzle point down at the floor and walked into the living room.

"You’ll help me?" he asked.

"I didn’t say that," she said. "I’m just not afraid enough of you to shoot you. Go connect my phone."

6

She waited in the living room and watched John Felker come in and sit in the chair across the room. She picked up her telephone, listened to the dial tone, then put it back in the cradle. "You were a policeman." The light was behind her, so it shone over her shoulder to illuminate him and remind her that there wasn’t much time left before dark.

"Eight years. You want to know why I’m not now."

"Yes."

"It’s a long story."

"What else have we got to do?" It sounded wrong, even to her. It was almost flirtatious. She tried to be businesslike. "I’ve got time."

"It came to me that the job just wasn’t what I pretended it was."

"What was it?"

"You take a long, close look at all the people you’ve arrested, sometimes the easy way, sometimes the hard, with broken bones and blood and abrasions. They’re mostly the kind of person who, when you talk to him, just hasn’t got a clue."

"A clue about what?"

"It isn’t just that they don’t know there’s a law about resisting arrest. They’re not too clear on laws like cause-and-effect and gravity. The world goes on around them and steps on them all their lives, but they don’t have any idea why, and it drives them half crazy. They don’t know why the guy next door has a new television set and they don’t. Later on in prison they get tested and they can barely read, and they’re addicted to everything, and their future is nothing."

"You felt sorry for them?"

"Not sorry enough to stop arresting them. What happened to me was that I could see that my own future was the same as theirs. I was going to have to spend twelve more years with these people—dragging them in, because they don’t even know that much, that when they’re driving at a hundred and ten, the helicopter over their heads isn’t going to lose sight of them if they go a hundred and twenty, or that fifteen cops at their door aren’t going to give up and leave them alone, no matter how hard they fight. If you spend all your time with them, you’re just living the other half of their lives."

"Twelve more years—that was until retirement?"

"Yeah."

"So you quit?"

"I quit. I drew my credit-union balance and went to school. I got a C.P.A. license and went to work as an accountant at Smithson-Brownlow."

"What’s that?"

"It’s the twelfth biggest accounting company in the country. The St. Louis office is one of seventeen."

"Sorry, I count my own money. What happened?"

"I lasted almost five years. Then one day I was at work and I ran across a problem. I think it was an accident, but I can’t even be sure of that. Somebody may have been setting me up to see it."

"See what?"

"One day a guy I didn’t even know, on a different floor of the building, comes in, turns on his computer, and a message on the screen says, ’Bang. You’re dead.’ Then everything that was in his hard disk rolls across the screen and disappears forever. It’s a computer virus. You know how they work, right?"

"Sure," she said. "You lost everything."

"No," he said. "They lost everything on his machine and five or six others and the mainframe. But one of the bosses was in early, kept his head and stopped the rest of us from turning ours on. The computer company sent over a program doctor, like a detective. He managed to find out how the virus worked, and delete it from the program. It took him about two weeks. He also searched every floppy in the office and found out the virus came from a disk somebody had brought in with a computer game on it. Every disk he used that went into another computer got that computer too, and so on. Of course nobody admitted to the computer game, and they couldn’t tell whose machine was first. But mine was clean."