Deadlock (15 page)

Hutch said, “I gave him my cell phone, so don't call it. Tell the kids not to call either. I think he'll be up the creek if they discover him with it.”

“I hate to think what ‘up the creek' means in a place like that.”

Hutch closed his eyes, trying not to think about it. He said, “Is Logan angry I wasn't there when he got up?”

“More like disappointed. I told him something really important came up.”

“What'd he say?”

“He said, ‘What else is new?'”

Hutch swore. “Sorry. Put Logan on. I'll try to explain.”

“They're outside playing. How about calling back before bedtime?”

“I will, but tell him I'll make it up to him.”

“I did.”

“I'll make it up to all of you.”

“I know,” Laura said. “I took them to the zoo, got them thinking about real monkeys, not the ape their dad can be.”

“Ha, ha.”

“We had a nice day,” she assured him. “I made breakfast, and we had lunch out. We're going to make cookies tonight.”

“I appreciate it, Laura. I know this isn't what you had in mind for your visit.”

She said, “Well, the bright side is that I'm getting to know your kids better.” She paused. “Are you glad you went?”

“I found out enough to keep me busy for a while,” he said. “I'll tell you about it when I get home.”

“I wish you could have booked a flight tonight. I don't like you being in Page territory.”

“He has a long reach,” Hutch said. “I'm not sure any place is safe from him. I think he had me followed.”

“What?” Frightened now. “Hutch, you gotta get out of there. Go straight to the airport, get on standby.”

“I'm not going to run scared. Page is just making a point. Killing me would draw more attention to him than he wants. That's what this meeting was about. He'd rather scare me off than resort to more drastic action.”

“Like what happened to that doctor's family?”

Hutch's stomach rolled over on itself. “I'm not saying the man's incapable of . . . of doing something like that. But he's smart enough not to, not in this case.”

Silence.

“Laura?”

Laura's voice was quiet but firm. “Just get back here.”

“Tomorrow afternoon,” he said, as cheerfully as possible. “I promise.”

Two hours later he was still on the bed, typing notes into his laptop. He had the room's phone cradled under his cheek. It had taken Randall Cunningham, an acquaintance at the Denver Museum of Art, only an hour to track down information about the sketch Hutch had seen in Page's outer office. Giovanni Cavalcaselle—Hutch had thought the last letter was an
O
—was an obscure Renaissance artist who'd lived in Florence. He was known as a chronicler of the city's dark side. His paintings depicted murder, double dealings, child abuse. According to art historian Raffaello Sanzio,
Genjuros in Primo Luogo Assassina
was commissioned as a painting but never completed. The preliminary sketch of it was last sold at auction for a modest sum.

“Okay, but what does it mean?” Hutch said impatiently.

“The title?” Randall said. “Genjuros' First Murder.”

Hutch waited for more. He glanced around the dark room, realizing night had descended without his noticing. He switched on the bedside lamp. “What's Genjuros?” he asked.

“Apparently the word is derived from the same Latin root from which we get
justice
and
juror
. It was a secret division of the city-state's security force established by Pietro de' Medici in 1435.”

“Security force?” Hutch said. “That sounds right. What did it do?”

“Only one function,” Randall said. “Supposedly, its members answered solely to Medici, and its missions were limited to the confines of Florence itself.”

“What, like a police force?”

“More of an execution squad. It was used against Florentines who were perceived enemies of the Medicis, and they had plenty. Normally citizens of a jurisdiction, then as now, are accorded a trial when accused of a crime. But criminal courts don't address noncriminal offenses. Say, political or romantic rivals, or getting your feelings hurt, for that matter. That's when a Genjuros-type group would come in handy.”

“Assassins,” Hutch said.

“Ready whenever you wanted them,” Randall agreed. “Private, secret, and not at all finicky about whom they kill.”

Someone knocked at his motel door.

“Randall, I have to go,” Hutch said. “I owe you one.”

“Anything for you, Hutch.”

Hutch hung up. He called, “Who is it?”

No answer. He cracked the door and looked through. The motel was a single-story U shape. The light next to each door appeared to be controlled as one, and they were all on now. Each room opened onto a concrete walkway and faced the parking lot. When he'd come to the motel in the late afternoon, having picked up dinner at McDonald's, only three vehicles were in the lot. His had made four. Since then, more cars had arrived, but there was no one standing at his door.

However, someone had placed a festive gift bag directly outside. It was the kind of bag you used when you didn't have time to wrap a present. He'd heard of bombs with mercury-controlled switches. As soon as someone moved them, they exploded. He heard Laura telling him that's how Page makes a point and shut the door. Who would leave a bag for him? No one knew he was there. Laura. Larry. The kids. Page—certainly he would be keeping tabs on him.

That brought to mind the beat-up Mustang. Hutch opened the door again and poked his head out. Slowly, he scanned the parking lot and saw it. It was parked on the right, at the end of the hotel's short wing. Only its bumper, hood, and part of its windshield were visible. Then the trees behind it flashed red, and Hutch knew someone inside had touched the brake pedal.

Again, Hutch thought Page could afford more professional surveillance, but what did he know? His knowledge of such things came almost exclusively from television shows. Maybe real PIs were so crass and confident, they didn't concern themselves with nice cars or stealth.

Hutch pulled his head in and shut the door. Was the package from the person who was watching him? Most likely. But what if it was from someone else, someone who wanted to help? As a reporter, he often fielded calls from tattletales who wanted to remain anonymous. If the package was evidence against Page, he
had
to retrieve it . . . before someone else did. If it had not been left by Mr. Mustang, then that guy must have seen someone drop it off. Wouldn't he come for it, score some extra points from the boss?

Hutch cracked the door again and squinted at the colorful bag. He imagined grabbing its hardened-twine handles, spotting the spark of a detonator, then . . . nothing.

He was being stupid. If they wanted to kill him, all they had to do was kick the door in and machine-gun the place. Or shoot at it with a grenade launcher. Or—he thought, disgusted with himself—put a mercury-switched bomb in a bag outside his motel door.

He considered his options, and realized they were pretty slim: retrieve the bag or not. He would like to learn more—and thought of a way to do it.

He opened the door and flipped the bolt so it wouldn't close. He slipped on his leather jacket, crossed the room, and entered the bathroom. Over the toilet was a small window, glazed with pebbled glass. He unlocked it and slid it up. If there had ever been a screen on it, it wasn't there now. Beyond a twenty-foot firebreak, the bathroom light caught the first vestiges of a dense forest.

As he climbed through, the window kept coming down on him: first on his head, then shoulders, lower back, legs. He dropped down onto dirt and gravel and shot quickly to the edge of the forest. If Page's people were watching him with any level of thoroughness, they would be keeping their eye on this open area behind the motel. Light shone through only three of the back windows. Still, he counted the windows from the edge of the building far to his left to make sure he knew which was his. He might have to reenter the way he left.

Moving along the edge of the forest, he kept a lookout for anything that could help him—or anyone who would want to hurt him. He found one thing right away—a twig the diameter of a garden hose. After breaking protrusions off of it, the twig was in the shape of a pistol.

The firebreak extended another twenty feet past the end of the building, where a shorter wing of the motel branched away. It was at the end of this extension that the Mustang had been parked.

Hutch continued along the edge of the forest and turned right when it did. Halfway to the end of the building he stopped. The trees glowed red, then fell back into darkness. The man had touched his brake again, but something else made Hutch's heart leap. In the brief glow in the brake lights, he thought he'd seen movement among the trees. A figure seemed to have darted behind foliage to escape the light.

Did Mr. Mustang have a partner? Did they know that Hutch had sneaked out of his room? If they did, wouldn't the partner have moved deeper into the woods sooner? Why not hide and wait for him?

He decided to treat the movement he'd seen as a man, not an animal or a trick of his eye. He also chose to assume he had not been discovered. He considered moving deeper into the woods and finding the man lurking there. But the man would be difficult to spot in these dense woods, and even harder to sneak up on. That left returning the way he had come or getting to Mr. Mustang too quickly for his partner to react.

The latter idea appealed to him more, since he still wanted to know who Mr. Mustang was and what he knew about the package. He continued edging toward the front of the building and the car, more carefully now. He listened for movement within the forest, watched for another clue to the man's whereabouts. By the time he came even with the Mustang, he had not spotted the second man again.

He crouched low and held his breath. The sound of a television program drifted from one of the rooms. Across the parking lot, the cursive neon words that told travelers the motel had vacancies flickered and hummed. Wind made the treetops sound like surf. If another man was nearby in the woods, he wasn't moving.

Stick to the plan
, Hutch thought.
Move fast. Grab him and go.

A terrible scenario occurred to him: his standing at the driver's door, yanking up and down on the handle, as both the man inside and his partner in the woods took a bead on him. He crawled farther along the tree line until the driver's side was visible. He had hoped to see a window rolled down, maybe the driver's elbow sticking out, but it was late November and the air had teeth. No one in his right mind would sit in weather like this with the windows down.

The brake lights flashed on, illuminating the ground between the Mustang and Hutch—illuminating Hutch. The glow was so bright it allowed him to see Mr. Mustang's face in the side mirror. The man's eyes flicked to the mirror and away, then back again. They had become the size of silver dollars.

Hutch ran for him. If the car door was locked, he would break the window: no hesitation. He pushed even harder, knowing his only chance was to get there before the man could pull a weapon or his partner could get off a shot. The toe of his shoe struck the edge of the blacktop, and he almost went down. Instead, he pinwheeled his arms and used the momentum to crash into the side of the Mustang. Before he could fully gain his feet, he had the door open—not locked! —and was grabbing at the man within. His fingers found a collar. He tugged at it, pulling the man sideways out of the car.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” the man was saying.

Hutch jabbed the business end of the pistol-shaped branch into his ribs. He said, “Get up. On your feet.”

They stood together.
Now what?
Hutch thought. He looked into the woods, expecting a muzzle flash or someone barreling directly at him. He moved his hand to the back of the man's collar, the branch to his spine. He shoved him forward.

“Okay,” Hutch said. “Let's go.”

TWENTY

The man didn't move. He said, “Wait! But—”

“Shut up,” Hutch said. “Just move. Fast.”

They approached the door and the bag sitting in front of it.

Hutch said, “What's in the bag?”

“I don't know.”

Hutch cracked him in the head with the branch. He repeated the question.

“I don't . . . I saw someone set it down, knock on the door. That's all I know!”

“Who?” Hutch jerked back on the man's collar, then pushed him forward again.

“I . . . Don't . . .
Know
.”

“Don't touch it,” Hutch said. “Open the door. Just push it.”

Mr. Mustang's foot snagged on the gift bag's handle. He fell into the room, pulling the package with him.

Hutch grimaced—but only for the millisecond he figured it would take for the bomb to detonate. When nothing happened, he once more scanned the area behind him. The porch lights did not reach far into the parking lot, but he saw nothing alarming and didn't hear anything like the scampering of feet, the slamming of car doors, or the chambering of shells in weapons. He stepped inside and slammed the door.

Mr. Mustang was rising to his knees. He was showing Hutch his hands, that they were empty. “I can explain.”

Hutch pressed his back against the motel room door. His eyes fell to the thing that had fallen out of the bag. It lay on the floor between him and Mr. Mustang. It was black, about the size of a hardback book—or the box of cigars Page had promised. Could it be? It must have been upside down; he could not make out any lettering or other distinguishing features.

He said, “What is that thing?”

The other man shook his head. “I'm not the one who left it for you. I don't know who did.”

“But you saw him. What can you tell me?”