42
The desk clerk seemed pleased to see me looking clean and dry for a change, so I smiled and nodded as I crossed the lobby.
“Good evening, sir,” he called out cheerfully. “Did your friends ever catch up with you?”
That stopped me.
“Friends?” I tried to sound offhand.
“Two of them. Looking for you earlier.”
I eased over toward the desk, lowering my voice.
“They, uh, must have missed me. What did they look like?”
I braced for a description of Kyle Anderson and some equally brawny pal.
“Oh, one was a younger fellow. Checked in yesterday right down the hall from you. Then this morning, after you went out after breakfast, there was an older gentleman. Very nice man, here for some charter fishing.”
Two men, and it wasn’t even clear they were working together. Yes, it was definitely time to leave Block Island.
“I’ll keep an eye out for them.”
I looked around nervously, but the lobby was empty. Then I headed down the hall toward my room, more determined than ever to catch the next available ferry. Fortunately the door was locked securely, just as I’d left it. I turned on the light, retrieved my suitcase from the closet, and tossed it onto the bed.
That’s when Breece Preston stepped out of the bathroom, holding a gun.
“I was beginning to wonder if old Giles was going to do all the dirty work for me,” he said. “I take it he wasn’t too pleased with what you’d gone and done, but I suppose cooler heads prevailed.”
Preston put his left hand in his trouser pocket and pulled out the little green Certified Mail receipts from the post office, which I’d put in my shaving kit for safekeeping.
“Good job finding all that old crap of his. And thanks for not sending it to Langley, or whatever bogus P.O. box they must have given you.” He looked down at the receipts. “Marty Ealing’s office. Not one of your better moves, although it will certainly make my job easier once I’m done here.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Why don’t we discuss it over drinks? I’ve already poured yours.” He nodded toward the bedside table, where a hotel glass brimmed with a cocktail on the rocks.
“What is it?”
“Kentucky bourbon, your favorite.”
“I prefer it neat.”
“Well, this will have to do. Have a seat. I insist.”
I sat on the bed, eyeing the bourbon. He walked around to face me, still standing, and now blocking my path to the door.
“Drink up.”
“You’re not joining me?”
“Maybe in a moment or two.”
I picked up the glass and sniffed. It smelled only like bourbon.
“What else is in here?”
He smiled, which told me all I needed to know. I put down the glass.
“I guess you want it to look like a heart attack or something.”
“You can never know for sure what a coroner will say in a backwater like this. But if you’d prefer I can always shoot you. Now that I have these”-he held up the mail receipts-”it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other.”
“How long have you been following me?”
“Didn’t pick up your trail until I saw you heading into the post office, or I’d have moved sooner. It’s a little tough getting out of the Pakistani tribal areas on short notice. But with Ron out of commission…” He shrugged. “Fortunately you started using your cell phone again or I might never have found you. Once I saw you were calling from Port Judith, it wasn’t too tough figuring out the rest. What’ll it be, then? Your choice, but I haven’t got all night.”
So this was to be my bad ending, then, no better than what had become of Folly in his final chapter, or poor old Alec Leamas in his, writhing at the base of the Wall. One went out gracefully, the other in a despairing surge of anger. The only emotions I seemed to have at my disposal were fear, rage, and frustration. I thought of David, of my dad, of Litzi. Even of April, standing in morning sunlight in her kitchen as someone telephoned with the news.
“Well?” He leveled the gun at my chest. There was a big ugly silencer on the end of the barrel. What I really wanted to do was jump to my feet and lunge at the gun, if only to make this as difficult and messy for him as possible. But nothing I’d learned in the survival class had taught me how to cover that much ground without getting blown away first. So I grasped for more time instead.
“What are you so worried about in all this? Humiliation, because Ed went bad on your watch? Or were you the one who turned him?”
“You haven’t earned those answers, you sloppy fuck.”
He extended his arm and tensed to fire. I grabbed frantically for the glass. Just in time, apparently, because he relaxed and lowered the gun. I responded by lowering the glass, wondering how long I could keep him going back and forth.
“Goddammit!” he said, raising the gun once again.
Then someone knocked at the door.
We flinched. Preston put a finger to his lips and slowly shook his head, then whispered, “You don’t want to get some poor maid killed, do you?”
“Police!” a man’s voice shouted gruffly. “You reported a robbery, sir?”
The smugness drained from Preston’s face, and he slowly lowered the gun. In one motion I threw the bourbon at his head, glass and all, and bolted up from the bed, bumping past him as he spluttered and spat at the toxic liquid. Then I opened the door onto a local cop, knees bent, gun pointed.
The cop jumped back, almost as startled as me. It was a miracle he didn’t shoot me. I raised my hands, showing they were empty, then sidled past him into the hallway as I blurted, “The other guy has a gun! He’s the one who’s robbing me.”
Preston apparently had no stomach for such an even matchup, or perhaps he was too smart to involve himself in the shooting of a policeman. He dropped his gun to the floor, held up his hands, and began pleading his case.
“Officer, this is a ridiculous misunderstanding.”
The policeman look relieved, but didn’t lower his guard.
“I’m sure you’ll have plenty of time to explain,” he said.
Just as I was becoming convinced that this would end well, I heard a door open down the hallway behind me. Of course. The second man. I braced for yet another twist that would turn the situation back in Preston’s favor, but when I turned I saw David step from the room.
Impossible.
In fact, it was so disorienting that for a fleeting moment I wondered if I hadn’t actually been shot and was dreaming up the entire scene from some last moment of consciousness while I lay flat on my back across the hotel bed.
“Hi, Dad.”
Then David smiled, and the thought disappeared. He was real. I was alive. And Breece Preston was in handcuffs, still dripping poisoned bourbon from his eyebrows.
To hear David tell it, everything had worked exactly according to my plan. He’d been there for the past two days, he said, watching my back just like I’d asked him to.
“ Asked you to? Where’d you get that idea?”
“From your signal, Dad.”
“My signal?”
