The Shadow Box (55 page)

There was
a bathroom. That door had a lock as well.
He would sit in the bathroom and wait in there.

Haroun, the Turk, did not like this so much.

He stood on the sidewalk watching the building that
was made of brown glass. He watched for several minutes
after the lawyer came running out and jumped up and
down until a taxi stopped for him. And so he is gone. But
how does one know what to do?

Every time Mr. Parker says a thing to Hector, Hector
says, “Here is what he means, Haroun.”

English is very difficult. There is no such confusion in
Turkish. In Turkish, “We don't like him” means “We
don't like him,” and “Go cut his throat” means “Go cut
his throat.”

Mr. Parker says many things which are equally impre
cise. One time, his use of the phrase “Fuck him” very
nearly caused great embarrassment. Since then, Hector al
ways translates.

And yet, thought Haroun, he cannot do nothing. Hector
says, “If you see the chance, Mr. Parker wants you to
take it.”

Easy for Hector but what if it's he who misunderstood? Will Hector take the blame? Haroun did not think so. Not
after the thing in the subway last winter when all Hector
had to do was give a little push to a tired man with a
full belly.

Haroun made a decision. Between killing and nothing
there is room for other choices. He will go into that build
ing and he will look for Mr. Hobbs. If he is no longer
our friend, it is right that he be punished.

Haroun would just cut him a little.

Moon had parked a block away. On his one slow pass
of Doyle's building, he saw a Con Ed crew that had
chalked off a strip of pavement and was about to tear it
up with jackhammers. And he saw the man who was watching. Neither had alarmed him greatly. Neither had
the look of a surveillance. The Con Ed men were busy watching women and the dark-skinned man seemed in a
dither.

He was talking to himself, he was wringing his hands.
Any decent surveillance takes two men at least. From what Moon could see, this man was alone and he wasn't really
watching the entrance. It was more the whole building.
He wasn't staring up at Doyle's window either because
Doyle's office was on the second floor rear.

There were other lawyers in Doyle's building. The
man's wife, for all Moon knew, might be in there
talking
divorce. That would account for a certain wildness in his
eyes. At one point, Moon thought he saw him mouth
“Fuck him.” Or “Fuck her.” One of those.

Moon drove on and parked. When he came back on
foot, the man was gone.

Hobbs, sitting on the lid of Doyle's toilet, heard the
commotion in the outer office.

The sounds were muffled by the thickness of two sets
of doors and by the chatter of a distant jackhammer. But he had heard a third door open and close and he heard
Doyle's secretary ask, “What do you want?” She asked,
“What do you think you're doing?” And then she tried
to scream. It ended with a squawk.

Hobbs put his vodka glass down and felt for his pistol.
But it could not be them, he told himself. The woman
would surely know them both. He pressed his ear against
the bathroom door. He heard the sound of the knob of the double doors being turned this way and that and the duller
sound of a shoulder testing its strength. The next sounds shocked him. A booted foot, stomping against wood. And
now of wood splitting.

Hobbs backed away. His legs became rubber. They
threatened to desert him. One hand struck the glass which
he had drained of vodka and sent it clattering into the
sink. He lunged for it, seized it, caressed it as if he were
silencing a dog. The shattered door, its hinges bent,
creaked open. And suddenly, he heard a cry of pain. Then,
with a sickening, splintering crash, the doors exploded
inward.

Moon had kicked him low, aiming for the spine. But
the man from the sidewalk had twisted as the double doors
gave way and the kick caught his hip instead. The man
slashed at him, blindly, with a long curved knife which
Moon had not seen. Moon caught the man's wrist in pass
ing. He bunched the fingers of his free hand and jabbed
with their tips at the killer's eye. He felt only soft tissue.
This blow was clean.

The man yelped and tried too late to cover it. For an
instant, he probed with his fingers, searching for an eye
that had been flattened and displaced. With an anguished
roar, he spat at Moon and whipped his foot at Moon's
crotch. But Moon was too close. Moon jabbed at his throat
with a rigid thumb and then at the remaining eye. The
man let out a choking wail. He wrenched himself free of
Moon's grip and stumbled, limping, through the shattered
double doors. Moon saw no sign of Doyle inside.

“Moo . . . Moon?”

He glanced toward Maureen who was behind her desk,
trying to pull herself up. Her mouth was bloodied. One
side of her face had begun to swell. The glance took the
smallest part of a second but in that time the man had
whipped his knife, blindly, at the place where he thought Moon was standing. Moon ducked and covered. The spin
ning knife caught the top of his skull. The handle, not the
blade, took skin. Now the man was clawing at his waist
for a pistol. He found it. Hands slippery with blood, he
fumbled for the safety.

Moon knew the weapon. It was the same Beretta, an
assassin's gun, that the man in Palm Beach had carried.
Moon could only imagine that this man preferred a knife.
Knife men like to see your eyes. This one wouldn't, not
after today. The man could not see but that gun still made
him dangerous.

“Moon?”

Maureen again. The man fired toward the sound of her
voice. Three pops like a hammer tapping wood, barely
louder than the noise from the jackhammer outside. Mau
reen was safe. She was shielded by the door frame and
the .22 slugs could not punch through the wall. The man
got quiet. He was listening for more movement.

Doyle must be under the desk, thought Moon, although
that would be unlike him. Hiding. Leaving Maureen to get
beat up or cut.

“Where's Doyle?” he asked her. The man snapped a
shot. Moon ignored it.

Still dazed, she shook her head. She said,
”B-bathroom.”

Inside, the man was moving by feel, trying to hobble.
Moon's kick, he knew, should have broken his hip. He
watched as the man fell across Doyle's desk, righted him
self, and fired two more shots toward the sound inside the
bathroom. The wood of that door was thin. Those did
penetrate. Moon listened. He heard a scrambling inside
and the sound of a dropped glass or bottle smashing
against the tile. But he heard no sound of a body falling.
The bullets must have missed.

Moon had his own pistol. He had the .45 Browning he
had taken from Walter and could have blown this man
across the room. But he wanted to take him, talk to him,
snap his fingers one by one until the killer gave him the
answers he wanted. The main thing, though, was the noise.
He had closed the hallway door behind him. The smashing
of the double doors had not caused a stir in the corridors, nor had all the hollering or the pop of that .22. One shot
from Moon's weapon, however, inside a closed room,
would vibrate through half the building.

“You got nowhere to go,” Moon told him from the
cover of the doorway. He worked the slide of his pistol
so that the man could hear it. “Put it down, we'll see
about a doctor for you.”

The man moved, Moon couldn't see where, but he heard
him breathing, feeling his way. Moon heard his own heart
thumping as well and his head had begun to feel floaty.
Better end this, he thought. He hit the floor with a roll,
aiming his body toward the cover of the desk. But as he
readied himself to rise, he heard three more shots, duller
than the others. He heard a bubbly kind of whistle that
he'd heard once before in a man who'd been lung-shot.
Moon looked.

The man was sliding down the bathroom door, very slowly, his jaw slack. Moon saw three new holes in the door. The wood around these was splintered out. Doyle
must have seen him through the first two holes and fired
when his shadow crossed the door.

Moon made no sound. He didn't speak or say, “Come
on out” or the like because he was busy saying, “Damn
it” to himself. He didn't want that one dead just yet.

The lock on the bathroom door clicked. It opened a
crack. And Moon thought he heard giggling. It didn't
sound like Doyle.

It wasn't.

“It's a Mr. Hobbs,” whispered Maureen, thickly. It was
hard for her to talk with that mouth. A shrug said she
didn't know much more. “Mr. Doyle had
to...he
told
Mr. Hobbs to wait here.”

Moon recognized him, at last, from those photographs in Florida. But if Hobbs saw him or heard Maureen, he
gave no sign. He was poking the man he'd just shot. Prod
ding him with his shoe. Holding one hand to his mouth.
That hand had a little silver gun in it.

This worked out after all, thought Moon. Doyle or no
Doyle, he'd rather question Hobbs.

“You can put the gun down now,” said Moon. He rose
cautiously, showing himself. “He can't hurt you no
more.”

Hobbs had to have known, Moon felt sure, there was another man out here. He'd heard sounds and words from
both of them. Who he thought the second man was, maybe
police, maybe building security, maybe even Brendan
Doyle come back, Moon couldn't say. But what he did
not expect was a black man, breathing hard, blood trick
ling down his forehead, who he knew was the man
called Moon.