Andrew Vachss - Dead and Gone

Nothing.

I waited for rush hour, made my way back to the hotel along the sidewalks, circled the block twice on foot. Then I went up to the room.

Gem was seated by the window, wearing the fluffy white hotel bathrobe, her hair wet and glistening.

I let my breath out.

“You want something to eat?” I asked, by way of telling her that we needed to wait for Byron so she didn’t have to go over everything twice.

She grinned.

Gem had honeydew melon and a pair of rare-roast-beef sandwiches on rye, slathered with Thousand Island dressing. And a glass of red wine. I watched her eat, not hungry myself, just chewing mechanically on my tuna, bacon, and lettuce club sandwich.

“What happened to the one who got close to you?” I finally asked her.

“I shot him.”

“I didn’t hear a—”

“With what I showed you. I told you it was very quiet.”

“So there’s a slug in him?”

“In his shoulder, yes.”

“Damn.”

“What is wrong?”

“Ballistics. I doubt they’d go to the cops, but your Derringer is marked now—you’ll have to ditch it.”

“I don’t think so. The barrels are smooth-bores. No rifling.”

“What kind of weird way is that to set up a piece? You probably couldn’t hit a Buick with that thing.”

“I could if I were sitting in it.”

“How close were you?”

“I pressed the end of the barrel into his shoulder while he was grabbing me. That is another reason why it was so quiet.”

“Was he—?”

“I cannot be sure. It seemed as if he wanted to … make me come with them. He acted as if he thought the others were right behind him. He did not consider that I might be armed. It is a great advantage.”

“Just his bad luck you had the piece.”

“It was his good luck,” she said quietly. “If I did not have my pistol, it would have been this.” She opened her hand. Inside was a long sliver of bamboo: wide at the butt end, as narrow as a hypodermic needle at the other. “For his eye. Then he would not have been so quiet.”

“Where’d you—?” I said, stupidly, before I caught myself. “You know,” is all she said.

It was almost ten that night before we heard Byron’s tap on the door. I let him in. He walked past me, pulling off a fog-colored silk raincoat, tossing it in the general direction of the closet.

“You want a drink?” I asked him. “Something to eat?”

“That minibar looks like it’ll do me,” he said. True to his prediction, he found a small bottle of cognac. “Just right,” he said approvingly, settling back on the couch. “Want me to go first?”

“Sure,” I told him.

“We’ve got their home base, brother. They diddled around for an hour or so. You know, double-backing, last-minute lane switches … even went the wrong way on a one-way one time. Très lame. They must have picked up those moves from TV. Then they got a little slicker. Parked their car, took a cab all the way over to the Northwest. They had another car waiting for them in Nob Hill—a Porsche. It was parked by that fancy cigar restaurant, the Brazen Bean. Looked right at home.

“I figure the first one for borrowed, a walkaway deal, have some stooge pick it up. No point spreading our manpower to keep it under observation.

“They must have decided there was no tail. Or that they shook it, whatever. From Pearl, they motored down to Lake Oswego. It’s like a suburb. A very ritzy suburb, I can tell you. They got lakefront property, garage connected to the house. So we saw them drive in, but not enter the house. Didn’t matter anyway. In a few minutes, they start turning on lights, moving around. They’re still there.”

“How do you know?”

“And they haven’t had any visitors,” Byron went on, holding up his pager to indicate his partner was still on the job. “At least not yet.”

“How long is your guy good for?”

“Till I come and relieve him. It’s not exactly the right surveillance spot for me, anyway. You know what the locals call Lake Oswego?”

“What?”

“Lake No-Negro,” he said, sourly. “It’s heavily patrolled, too.”

“Got it,” I told him. Then I turned to Gem. “Your turn,” I said.

She got to her feet like a schoolgirl called upon to recite, hands behind her back, holding Byron and me in her gaze.

“You must remember that the conversation was in Russian. Some of it does not translate perfectly. Or it may sound stilted.

“The man approached first. He asked, ‘Are you a friend?’ I told him I was from ‘a friend,’ and asked him if he would like to sit down. He seemed undecided, but then the woman just … loomed up on my other side.

“ ‘How did you find us?’ the man asked. I ignored the question, and began to tell him the story we had prepared. But he was not interested in your Dmitri—he acted like he did not know him at all. It was as you expected. So I said what we had decided on: Dmitri had been murdered, and the killers were friends of the original target of the assassination attempt which occurred when there was an attempt to ransom back their son.

“The woman was very brusque. She demanded to know whom I represented. What I was really doing there. I told her I was only a person with a message for them. Only those who hired me could answer her questions. I asked her if she wanted to meet those people.

“But before she could answer, the man asked me about Petya. He wanted to know what had happened to Petya. I had never heard that name from you. The woman hissed at him to be quiet, called him … It is hard to translate, but it means a man who is no man. A … gelding, perhaps?

“Then she asked me, why did whoever sent me think she and her husband were in danger? They had done nothing wrong.

“I told her what we had decided on—that the person who had almost been killed was brain-damaged, a vegetable in a coma.

But his friends believed he had been set up, and the only lead was Dmitri. They went to see him, but Dmitri turned to violence, and he was killed. That left only them—the man and the woman. The people who employ me believed they would be the next targets. And that the information should be worth a great deal of money to them.

“But that did not work as you expected. Instead of trying to bargain, the woman asked me again who my employers are. Again, I told her I did not know them but I could arrange a meeting. When I said that, the woman made some kind of signal with her hand and they both got up. I could not see where they went, because the skinheads were already charging at me.”

“Skinheads?” Byron asked.

“It looks like they wanted to snatch Gem,” I told him. “Maybe take her someplace where she’d do a better job of answering their questions.”

“Well, you’re both here, so …”

“Yeah. And whoever hired the skinheads is the same one who hired the Russians. Maybe.”

“Why only maybe?” Gem asked.

“First of all, they were kids. Not little kids, but teenagers. Not professionals. I can’t see someone who’d spend a few hundred grand to hit me saving a couple of bucks now by hiring amateurs. And, from the way you tell it, they weren’t there to watch the Russians. They were there to do whatever the Russians told them to—no orders going in. If it was a snatch from jump, they would have vamped on you from behind, while you were seated. It looks like they reacted to the woman’s signal.”

“So you figure, maybe the Russians aren’t straw men after all?” Byron asked.

“You add up what went down earlier to the fact that they got in the wind before the hit on me went down—the answer’s got to be no. They have to be players; we just don’t know how, yet.”