Liars & Thieves (27 page)

I inspected the house above me. How had he gotten in there? The underside of the first floor was ten or eleven feet above the sand. It seemed to consist of joists and wires and plumbing—in the darkness it was hard to tell. There were three entrances to the house that I could see: one off the deck, a back door, and a front door. The problem was that the steps to these entrances were suspended at least six feet in the air. He must have jumped up to one of these sets of stairs, scrambled up, and gone in. Easy enough for me to do, too, except for one thing. He would probably shoot me as I came through the door.

I certainly didn’t want to take that chance. Nor did I need to. With me under the house, he was trapped. If and when he came out, I would see him before he saw me. That would be my edge.

All I needed to do was sit.

I hunkered down behind one of the pillars, which gave me a bit of shelter from the wind and rain.

Minutes passed slowly, and I shivered. My shirt and trousers were wet and plastered to me, and I was wearing more sand than a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. Not much insulation value in sand, I found.

I dialed Jake Grafton on my cell phone. After three wrong numbers I got him. I told him where the killer and I were.

“I can’t get anyone here until morning,” he said. “Can you keep him corked until then?”

“Yeah.”

“Callie is going to take this trooper to the hospital,” Grafton continued. He was the coolest man under pressure I had ever met. He sounded as if he were ordering breakfast at an I HOP. “We’ll put him in the car and she’ll drive away. I’ll come back in the house and stay with Goncharov.”

“Will he stay in the house, you think?”

“By God, he’d better,” Grafton exclaimed, then the connection broke. I stowed the phone in my pocket.

Five minutes later I saw them come out of their house half carrying the injured man. They got him into the back seat of Grafton’s car, then Grafton went back into the house and Callie drove away. I was glad to see that. Anyone entering that house would come face to face with one tough man armed with an MP-5.

The night passed slowly, agonizingly so. I shivered and slapped myself and listened to the wind . . . and waited.

Waiting is damned hard. You can’t relax; you must remain ready. Any second you may find yourself in a fight for your life. Yet it’s difficult to maintain the intensity over time. As the minutes pass you can feel the readiness leaking away.

A half hour passed, then another. Never had time seemed so heavy. Several times I thought I heard a noise from the house over my head, but perhaps not. With the wind and pounding of the rain it was hard to tell.

The night dragged as I sat shivering. The pounding of the rain being blown horizontally began to hurt after a while, but I was already doing everything I could to escape it.

I thought about everything as I fought to stay awake and alert— women, past misadventures, things I had done that I wished I hadn’t, things I hadn’t done that I wish I had. Every man should

have a list of things to do before he dies, and I had mine. Things like kill the son of a bitch who sent killers to cut people up to make them talk, to kill them to keep them silent.

The preachers say you shouldn’t think evil thoughts—they rot the soul, corrode it. All I can tell you is that I got no heat from mine.

Just when I thought I was nearing my limit of endurance, the storm eased, the wind velocity dropped. Even the rain let up. I fought the drowsiness that overcame me when I ceased shivering.

I knew he knew I was still here. Don’t ask me how I knew, but I did, to a certainty. He was upstairs waiting and I was waiting down here.

Waiting … for his nerve to break? For him to try something. Anything.

The sky was beginning to lighten up just enough for me to see the ocean and base of the clouds when something fell from the west side of the house into the sand. I heard the sound of it hitting, just a muffled plop. That jolted me to maximum alert. I spun and threw myself prone on the sand with the pistol out in front, ready to shoot. I couldn’t see what it was because of the piles that held up the house. There were perhaps two dozen.

It wasn’t a man that fell—I sensed that. Not loud enough. But what was it?

I wasn’t dumb enough to crawl closer to see. Maybe I wasn’t that curious. I knew if I waited I would get my shot.

The seconds ticked by. I turned my head back and forth, watching, but nothing moved.

A minute passed. Two. Three. The sky seemed to be turning lighter.

Something burned across my back like a hot iron. The shock of it drew a grunt from me. There was a soft plut of a noise, but perhaps I imagined it more than heard it. Instinctively I knew that I had been shot.

I rolled over, pistol held in both hands. I thumbed the safety off as I scanned the ground.

Another sound, louder this time, and an angry bee whizzed by my ear.

I saw him then, on the stairs down from the deck on the beach side of the house. The only reason I was still alive was that he was lying on the deck and shooting at me upside down. All I could see was the dark place where his head and shoulders blotted out the lighter gray of the sky.

I rushed my first shot, which didn’t seem as loud as I thought it should be. I settled down, began squeezing them off as quickly as I could line up the sights in that terrible light.

He might have shot at me again and I didn’t hear it—I don’t know—but after my fourth or fifth shot he lost the rifle. It fell from his hands.

I managed to rise. I walked toward him, the pistol pointed, ready to shoot again.

He didn’t move.

Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I shot him again in the neck from a distance of about eight feet.

The rifle was a compact one with a silencer on the barrel. I picked it up, tossed it up on the deck, then hoisted myself up on the bottom rung of the deck stairs, which ended in midair. My back was on fire. Somehow I knew the bullet wasn’t in me; it must have grooved my back without hitting the bone.

Only when I was climbing the steps did I realize that there might have been two of those dudes in that house. My pistol was in my pocket, where it would do me no good.

One thing for certain—the shooter was really dead. Dead as hell. Blood all over the step where he had fallen. I grabbed his feet and tried to pull him back into the house out of sight of passersby on the beach. He weighed a ton, at least. With my back hurting like hell and heavy as he was, it was all I could do to get him through the door to the living room.

The house was gutted. Now I got the pistol out, stood listening. Heard wind coming through the broken windows in that ramshackle derelict, which couldn’t have been over ten years old. They must have just got it completed when the storms washed the beach out from under it.

I went through the house carefully. Someone had left a lot of trash in an upstairs bedroom—camped up there, it looked like— but I was the only living person in the house.

Downstairs I paused to look at the dead man. In novels after the hero kills somebody he is supposed to pause for some soul-searching and introspection, think a deep thought. No deep thought occurred to me. I wanted to kick the bastard, but he was dead and I didn’t feel like wasting the calories.

I was sitting on the steps outside when Jake Grafton came out from under the house. “How many were there?”

“One.” I jerked my thumb over my shoulder.

“Help me up,” he said, and extended a hand.

I helped Grafton roll him over so we could look at his face. “Is this that CIA killer Royston was supposed to have hired?”

“Stu Vine?” Grafton studied the slack face with the staring eyes. “I don’t know. It’s possible, I suppose. Whoever he was, he rushed it. Shouldn’t have gone after the sniper in the hide. That was a silly mistake.”

“Maybe the challenge of it intrigued him.”

Grafton turned and studied my face. “Perhaps,” he admitted. He picked up the sniper rifle with the silencer. It was a Ruger with a 3ȕ9 variable scope. “One of these new .17 calibers,” Jake Grafton said, then laid it on the floor. “Fires a seventeen-grain bullet, tiny little thing. He must have been planning for head shots.”

“Quiet, too. Played hell with my back.”

He inspected the wound. “Just a gouge. Bleeding some.”

“He got me facing one way, then tried to pop me in the back. Would have done better if he had been right side up.”

We were outside on the deck looking at the ocean when a police vehicle, a Jeep Cherokee, drove up. The officer rolled down his window. “You people aren’t supposed to be in that house. Didn’t you see the sign ?”

Truly, I hadn’t. Would have ignored it if I had, but I didn’t tell him that.

“Come on,” the officer said. “That building is condemned. Get down out of there before it collapses with you in it.”

I jumped down facing him so he wouldn’t see the blood on my shirt or the pistol tucked into the small of my back. Grafton climbed down. When we were both on the sand the officer said, “Don’t let me catch you in there again.”

“Yes, sir,” Jake Grafton said.

Satisfied we were properly chastised, the officer drove on along the beach.

We walked back to the Graftons’, where the admiral worked on my back with iodine and Band-Aids. He used at least a dozen. When he had me fixed up, he went to call some friends about the corpse. After he hung up, he told me they would come get the dead man tonight after dark.

On that happy note we sat down on his porch to drink a beer even though it was only six in the morning. A bit later Callie called Grafton from three blocks away. He told her the coast was clear. The trooper had been shot twice, but he was on IVs and stable, Callie said. She told the people at the hospital she didn’t know him, didn’t know who shot him or where. A policeman came by the hospital and got her name, said he would call her later.

We aren’t doing so good in this war,” I remarked to the admiral.

He didn’t deny it. He was always like that—upbeat, optimistic, bucking up the troops.

We rolled into New York through the Lincoln Tunnel. With Sarah Houston, Willie Varner, and Joe Billy Dunn in the van, it had been a hell of a trip. Willie sat in the back telling Tommy Carmellini stories while he sipped beer. Houston was in the passenger seat beside me. She didn’t have much to say while Willie ran his mouth, but from time to time she gave me an appraising glance.

Most of Willie’s tales were lies—for reasons too obvious to mention, I had long ago learned that the less said to people about my business the better. Didn’t matter to Willie. He told what he knew, what he suspected, and downright bald-faced lies, all with the same air of omniscient authority. To hear him tell it I was the worst desperado since Willie Sutton. There wasn’t a safe made that I couldn’t crack, a wall I couldn’t climb, a man alive I couldn’t con.

Joe Billy egged him on, all the way across Delaware and New Bfsey. Approaching New York 1 turned on the radio, found a jazz ation, and cranked the volume up. Even then I could hear Willie talking loudly to Dunn, telling him whatever lies popped into his crooked head.

The tunnel was a relief. I snapped the radio off and told the guys in back to shut up. Amazingly, they did. Wanted to see New York, I guess.

The streets and avenues were packed, as usual. What all these millions of people do to make a living is one of the unsolved mysteries of the modern age, but make a living they do. There they were, scurrying along the sidewalks and crosswalks like a horde of ants or a biblical plague of locusts while trucks, taxis, and limos jammed the streets, honking, creeping, oozing along like thick mud flowing down a storm drain.

We circled the New York Hilton once, looking for Secret Service agents and vehicles. True, the president wasn’t supposed to stay at this hotel, and the convention was being held at the Javits Center, but they just might be in there today anyway, which would complicate our lives. Didn’t see anything or anyone out of the ordinary, though.

We dropped Sarah at the corner near the front of the joint. She could do her thing anyplace that had a telephone line, but the Hilton had a high-speed cable Internet connection, so why not?

She marched away in her high heels and New York business suit, her laptop case dangling from a strap over her shoulder, pulling her overnight bag on its little wheels. With her head erect and hair stirring in the breeze, I had to admit, she was a fine-looking hunk of woman. Little twisted upstairs, but I didn’t regard that as a disqualifying disability, not in this day and age. And who was I to talk?

What I found fascinating was the way her hips swayed with—

The guy behind me beeped; the light had changed. Joe Billy— now in the passenger seat—gave him the finger, and we circled the block again. In that traffic, each circuit took about twelve minutes.

We were halfway into the next one when my cell phone rang. “I’m in,” she said. That meant she had checked into her room and been shown upstairs. She was now on-line and had hacked into the Hilton’s central computer. That wasn’t as big a feat as you might imagine, since she had explored the security firewalls at her leisure at her office at the NSA facility at Fort Meade. Indeed, yesterday she had twice crashed the hotel’s video security system for ten seconds at a time. “And it’s down.” Down again, she meant, and couldn’t be resurrected until she fixed it.

“Okay.” I hung up, put the phone in my shirt pocket.

Actually, circling the hotel was sort of dumb. I headed up the avenue toward Central Park. We were rolling through the park when the telephone rang again.

“They’ve called a service company. I’ve just called the company back and canceled the call. Give them about a half hour before you arrive.”

“Okay.”

I returned the telephone to my pocket and told the guys, “We’re a go.”

Exactly thirty-two minutes later we rolled into the hotel’s service entrance and parked beside two trucks off-loading supplies—one food, one liquor. At the control console in back, Willie began the final check on our bugs. Joe Billy and I grabbed our tools and got out, locking the van behind us.