16
It would take at least two and a half hours driving south to get to the airport, depending on the condition of the roads, but the eleven o’clock flight to New York was still a reasonable possibility, and if they missed it there would be others. He toyed with the possibility of getting a couple of first-class upgrades.
This time he parked the car right in Renata’s driveway. The sun wasn’t up yet, but the sky was lightening to a chalky gray as they came in through her back door.
“You wait in the living room while I pack, Charlie.”
He went in and sat down by the fireplace, placing the satchel safely at his feet. Again he picked up Renata’s paperback and tried to make out the language. The alphabet was Roman but there were odd characters and accents scattered throughout the text, and he found no name on the copyright page that corresponded to any city he knew. The paper was cheap and brittle, and a number of the pages were coming loose from the glue where she’d cracked the spine. On the cover was an amateurish painting of a farmer and his wife looking bravely out into the hazy future, suggesting a Soviet-bloc origin—Hungary? Poland? Lithuania?
“No time to screw, I don’t think, but if you feel like it I’ll blow you before we get going,” she yelled from the bedroom. Her accent was a shade more pronounced than usual, as though she sensed he was speculating on her origins. “In the meantime, why don’t you fix yourself a drink?”
He looked down at the satchel. Inside was the Johnnie Walker Black. He decided to wait until after the blow job and stood up. She was standing over an open suitcase on the bed. “Are you leaving the photos?”
She looked back at the framed photographs as though she’d forgotten they were there. “They’re not mine.”
“Whose are they?”
“How do I know? Why don’t you wait in the living room.”
“Where are you from, Renata? Originally.”
“Why are you asking me questions, Charlie? What’s it got to do with anything?”
“I was just curious. I always wondered where you came from.”
“It’s a long story. We’ve got plenty of time to get better acquainted, don’t you think?”
“Yeah.” He went back to the chair by the fire, opened the satchel, and twisted the cap of the Johnnie Walker Black, tearing the tax stamp. His eye was drawn to the .22. Was the safety on? Did a .22 pistol even have a safety? He set the bottle down and picked up the pistol. Before tonight he’d never killed anyone in his life, and now he’d killed two. Three, if you counted helping Vic kill Roy Gelles. Call it two and a half. He wondered between the three of them how many people Vic, Roy, and Bill had killed over the years. There wasn’t a single incident he could name with any certainty, except for Vic killing Desiray. Bill Gerard was supposed to have beaten one of his streetwalkers to death with his bare fists once for talking back, but Charlie had always suspected that the story had been exaggerated or even concocted wholesale to impress and frighten Bill’s colleagues and competition alike. In the end, Bill had turned out to be pretty easy to kill, even for a beginner. He weighed the pistol in his palm, thinking how close it had come to ending his life. A simple nervous reflex stemming from the shock of Renata’s teeth clamping down on the shaft of Bill’s penis had saved Charlie and Renata both from a bullet.
He dropped the .22 back into the satchel and was starting to picture the blow job when Renata’s plan came back to him with nauseating clarity: the idea had been for her to blow Bill and kill him while his guard was down. He looked around the corner past the fireplace, back toward the bedroom. Renata’s going away with him made no sense for her. Depending on his or anyone’s generosity for her survival wasn’t in her nature.
Fucking idiot. He set the bottle down again and approached the bedroom door.
“I’m almost done, Charlie. Go back and sit down.”
“I just wanted to ask you something.”
She stopped and looked up at him. “What?”
He didn’t really have a specific question planned. “Nothing. Sorry.”
“Go back and sit down. I’ll be done in a second and then I’ll come in and give you a blow job like you’ve never had in your life.”
He went back to the living room and sat down. He picked the .22 back up and waited. He’d almost allowed his giddy relief at getting the money back and the inconceivably beautiful prospect of a life with a spectacular, unattainable woman to cloud his good judgment. Renata had been in on it with Vic, and she’d most likely called the cops to report the burglary at Bonnie’s house. He had more than a quarter of a million dollars in a satchel, and he’d nearly traded it for a blow job that he wouldn’t have lived to see the end of.
He listened to her in the bedroom, singing a song he couldn’t identify. She had to be armed in some way. His only tactical advantage was her continuing belief that he was under her power.
“Almost done, Charlie,” she called. “You want me naked or in some kind of sexy underwear?”
Either way might have weakened his resolve. “Fully clothed.”
“What, like the suit I had on yesterday?”
That would have been even worse. He closed his eyes. “Whatever you’ve got on now. We’re running low on time.”
“Whatever you want, Charlie.”
He got up and moved across the room. He stood in the shadows near the kitchen door with the pistol.
“How long do you think we’ll be in New York? Two, three days? Then we’re out of the country? Charlie?”
She stopped by the fireplace, looking back toward the bathroom, and he raised the pistol. She was beautiful. Her face was softer than he’d ever seen it. It was almost sweet. “Charlie?” She chuckled, as though his absence signaled a game. She turned toward the bedroom, brow furrowed in playful curiosity. “Are you back there? Did you double back on me?” As she disappeared from sight he lowered the pistol. He followed her into the hallway.
“Charlie?” She had her head stuck into the bedroom, one leg outstretched into the hallway for balance. Now was the time, while he couldn’t see her face. Pretend she’s a duck. He fired, the sound cracking through the little house like a cherry bomb, and Renata fell into the door frame, a small wet spot on the back of her black sweater. She let out a quiet gasp as she slid to the oak floor. She turned enough as she did so to face Charlie when she hit the ground.
“What the fuck did you do that for? I think you hit me in the lung. Jesus, Charlie, call a doctor. Jesus. Jesus.”
“I’m sorry,” Charlie said, taking aim again, and he was. The second shot seemed louder than the first, and he knew he’d have to get out in a hurry this time. It, too, hit her in the chest.
“Why, Charlie, why?” The uncomprehending sorrow in her face and voice made him momentarily sure he’d made the wrong decision, but there was no changing it now.
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
“Call an ambulance.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“Then sit here and hold me,” she whimpered.
He knelt down beside her, intending to comfort her for just a moment before finishing her off as an act of mercy. She began to wail as he put an arm around her shoulder, and as the wail became a curse he pulled away from her just in time to avoid taking a filleting knife in the throat. The knife grazed the side of his neck, and scrambling back to his feet he renounced any hope of getting close enough to make contact between the pistol and her head. He fired a third time and was close enough to put it into her forehead, interrupting in midsyllable a curse in Hungarian or Lithuanian or Polish. He stood over her weeping, disconsolate at her having proved him right. He dropped the pistol into the satchel and walked out the back door. The sky was brighter now, still overcast and dark, but the promise of the morning to come was there. None of the neighbors’ lights were on, but he assumed he’d been seen.
He drove to the Sweet Cage to get Bill Gerard’s car, on the assumption that the neighbors had probably heard the shot and that one of them might have had the presence of mind to take down the number of Betsy van Heuten’s Mercedes. He hated to give up the Mercedes, and he considered switching the plates, but it would take time and he might be seen. It was just a two-and-a-half- or three-hour ride down to the airport, anyway.
He parked the Mercedes next to the Lincoln and unlocked the side door with Sidney’s keys. He moved through the dark to Renata’s office where Bill’s body lay. The four-ten lay on the desk with Amy Sue’s blue panties still twisted, shimmering, around its barrel. Bill’s keys were next to it, where Renata had dropped them. He placed them in his side pocket with his own and Sidney’s. Hearing them clank, and feeling the jagged, unwieldy load cut into his thigh, he envisioned potential problems at the airport metal detector, and he pulled out his own key ring and tossed it onto the floor as the least useful set of the three. Not exactly a neat crime scene, he thought, with his keys on the floor next to the corpse, and his fingerprints all over a shotgun on the desk, but he didn’t have time to dispose of any of it, and in any case he’d be a distant memory by the time anybody found any of it and made sense of it all. In a way it struck him as funny.
He was pulling out of the driveway in Bill’s Lincoln when he had second thoughts about Sidney’s keys. They weren’t just keys to the club; they were house keys and car keys, things he’d have a hard time replacing. It was no skin off his ass to swing by and drop Sidney’s keys in his mailbox. Then he’d be on his way.
He got to Sidney’s house and parked. He got out and put the keys in the mailbox and got back behind the wheel, then opened the door and got out again. There was no mail on Christmas, and Sidney would certainly need his keys long before he’d have occasion to check for mail. He took them out of the mailbox and walked across the crunchy snow of the lawn to the front door. The storm door was loose and he put the keys atop its knob so that they’d fall if the door was moved. He was halfway back to the car when the door opened and the keys fell with a light metallic smack.
“Charlie?”
“Oh, Sidney, yeah, I accidentally took your keys.”
“My keys?” Sidney squatted down and picked up the key ring. “How’d that happen?”
“They fell onto the closet floor when I was hanging my coat up, and I picked ’em up, thought they were mine. You been to bed yet?”
“Why bother, the kids’ll be up in an hour anyway. Thanks for bringing these back. I’d have been screwed without ’em.”
“Well, Merry Christmas.”
“You too, Charlie.” Sidney turned and went inside.
He was beginning to feel tired, and for a minute he thought about driving out to the municipal airport in town and avoiding the drive south, but here was one part of Vic’s plan that did seem to hold water. If he did it, he’d be leaving a trail that would lead to him before he left New York, whereas it would ideally be several days at least days before anybody could place him on a flight that left a hundred fifty miles to the south. He took surface streets south and west toward the southernmost turnpike booth, an old habit he had, to avoid paying thirty or forty cents extra on the toll. He took a short, impulsive two-block detour into a residential neighborhood as he neared an old girlfriend’s apartment and slowed down to a stop in front of it. It was the end apartment of one of several identical redbrick buildings, cramped apartments in rows of four. He wasn’t quite sure which of the buildings hers had been, and he didn’t have the slightest idea what had become of her. In fact, he barely remembered anything about her beyond her name, what she looked like, and where she had lived, but it seemed to him as he sat there that he’d spent some of the best nights of his life with her in one of these ratty little apartments. The buildings had deteriorated since he’d been there last, and in the dull haze of the morning he saw that wood was peeling off the front door of the nearest apartment in long, thin vertical spikes behind a torn screen door. He pulled away and headed again for the turnpike.