There’s a truck waiting down there, and you’re just taking them down the stairs, right?”
“Fine,” says the manager.
“Keep me in the middle, same distance from both of you. Go at the count of three. Carefully, so nothing happens to the clothes. Ready. One. Two. Three.”
They’re both taller than he is, but he hunches down anyway. He knows he’s invisible from below. It’s a watcher a level up that worries him.
And that’s precisely where Janos is, drinking his third cup of coffee, shifting from foot to foot and wishing with some intensity that he could take a bathroom break. He’s been staring for almost twenty minutes at the front of the store that Murphy went into, and it feels like an hour. The woman has gone into the store, too, and she hasn’t come out yet, so he’s stuck here. He has no idea where Shen is, although Rafferty hadn’t seemed worried about Shen. But it’s sloppy. He needs half a dozen people, with radios, to do this right.
He’s pulling out his phone to give Vladimir a piece of his mind when the women come out, carrying what looks like a whole rack of clothes. He goes up on tiptoe to see whether he can look over it, but he can’t; he’d have to be practically on top of them to do that.
So they’re moving clothes-they’ll take them to the escalator. Except that they turn left, heading for the stairway, the stairway Murphy came up. Maybe it’s nothing, maybe the people who run the mall don’t want that kind of shop business done in sight of the customers. Or maybe Murphy’s got himself an escort.
Rafferty’s not due to arrive for ninety minutes. Why would Murphy be leaving? And would he be leaving without the woman?
If it’s not Murphy, and Janos goes out of position to check, he could miss it if Murphy actually does move. This might be a diversion to draw whoever’s watching, leaving the area clear for Murphy to walk out two minutes from now, big as life. Janos leans forward, elbows on the railing. He’s forgotten about pissing. The shop attendant in front pulls the door to the stairs open, toward her, and gives it a shove; it’s the kind that swings closed automatically, and they’ll have to hurry to get through before it shuts on them. And they’re not going to make it. The woman in front is through, and the door is closing on the center of the rack, and then it’s pushed back again, and it opens and starts to close, and the woman at the back pushes it open again.
Two people, three shoves on the door. The woman in front could have kicked back at it, or …
Vladimir and the boy are at the front exit, waiting for word.
Janos makes a decision and takes the down escalator in a kind of swan dive.
THE THIRD BEDROOM is small and dim and smells like a sickroom. Rafferty flicks on the wall switch, but nothing happens. The only light comes through the door in the hallway. He stands there, letting his eyes adjust, listening for the sound of movement behind him, and gradually he sees a milky line of light beneath a door in the room’s far right corner.
To open that door, he’ll have to go through the bedroom, and he realizes that he doesn’t want to. Rose, he thinks, would take one look and back away, saying, “Bad place.”
The rumpled bed, the sheets creased sharply, as though the person who sleeps there perspires heavily, a lemon yellow, edgy smell that Rafferty associates with fever, the absolutely bare walls-not a picture, not a poster, not a mirror-all fill him with a deep uneasiness. His eyes go to the ceiling. The area above the bed has been attacked with paint: spirals and loops and jagged, shapeless lines, random as roughly torn paper, in dark reds and chromium yellows and a lot of black. Years ago Rafferty had seen video of a spider spinning a web under the influence of lysergic acid, and that web had the same uncontrollable, fractured energy. Imagination as broken glass. He looks away, feeling vertiginous, and then up again. This is what the person on the bed, lying on her back, would have seen: a ceiling full of cracks and fault lines, a solidity on the verge of flying apart, but to what end? Would something come down-was that the meaning of the slashes of red and yellow? — or would the person on the bed be drawn up? And up to what?
Holding his breath, he enters the room and walks swiftly to the door with light beneath it, which he pulls open. It’s a bathroom, very long and narrow, with a window at each end, looking out on both the back and the front yards. Other than the peculiar shape, it’s purely functional: small and plain, with a single fluorescent tube running almost the full length of the ceiling. The bathtub, located below the back window, is piled full of white, an irregular, cloudlike surface of white cloth. He reaches over and tugs a fold close to him, and what he’s holding is a filthy white nightgown. He looks again. There must be thirty of them in the tub.
The nightgown smells of damp and sweat and dirt. It’s the same smell he’d caught downstairs, standing in the archway to the kitchen with the open door behind him.
From nowhere Miaow’s face suddenly swims up at him with its usual mix of hope and apprehension, and he finds himself on the verge of tears. He wants to be anywhere in the world but here.
He tosses the nightgown back into the tub and looks around to find a reason for the room’s shape. And there it is, a door in the wall opposite the small bedroom, closed and locked. Feeling the pressure of time, he goes quickly through the bedroom and into Murphy’s room. It takes him about four minutes to find the ring of keys; he begins by pulling out the drawers in the dresser and feeling their undersides. The bottom drawer comes out completely, and there it is, on the bare concrete floor beneath.
The first key on the ring opens the door.
The room is as long as the bathroom and twice as wide. It’s unfinished; there’s no drywall, and the floor is bare plywood. A small cache of firearms, including holstered sidearms, automatic weapons, and what seem to be wooden spears, fills one corner. Old uniforms hang on hooks set into the two-by-four uprights in the wall, and a low table, the size of a single bed, is piled with papers and photo albums. He opens one and sees a much younger Murphy and two other Americans in camouflage fatigues grinning at the camera. They flank a stick, much like the ones he sees in this room, on which is impaled the wide-eyed head of a young Asian male.
He pulls out Ming Li’s little silver camera and photographs the page. And the next. And the next. They get worse by the page. By the time he goes downstairs, he’s moving much more quietly. He doesn’t want to wake the dead.
He’s halfway down when he hears the noises from below, a whirring and a faint, repetitive clicking.
Janos is slowed by the crowd on the main floor and has to push his way to the entrance and then run, as fast as he can, around the entire structure to reach the door at the bottom of the stairs. It’s heavy steel, and he pulls it open with both hands, only to hear the indignant voices of the two women climbing back up.
He’s missed Murphy. If it
And now he’s out of position, not watching the girl, not watching Murphy, not watching Shen. He can almost see the thousand dollars he’s been promised floating away, above the roofs of the parked cars. He can’t just go back in and hope everything’s fine. He has to know whether he was right, and he has to know which exit Murphy will take. If it
He bats the doubt away and stands still, letting his eyes go soft and unfocused, trying to keep the entire scene in front of him in sight. It’s dark and raining, which doesn’t help. When he’s got the gaze he wants, he very slowly turns his head, taking in the part of the lot that’s visible from this side of the building, looking for nothing but movement.
He gets it, three parking rows away, a short man in a hurry, zigzagging between wet, gleaming cars, not paying any attention to him at all. Janos takes off at a run, up on the balls of his feet to avoid making scuffing noises, trying not to catch up to Murphy but to get a look at which way his car is going, so he can direct Vladimir and the Thai pretty boy who romanced Murphy’s maid. Then he’s to alert Rafferty on the phone, and Vladimir will call to confirm or deny that Murphy is headed home.
Janos slows and stops. He’s a row of cars beyond the one he spotted Murphy in, but he can’t see the man. To his right he hears a car start, and he turns toward it.
And hits his cheekbone on the fast-moving barrel of a gun.
It’s a revolver, Janos registers instinctively, and the sight on the end of the barrel has torn the skin over his right cheekbone. He raises a hand to touch it, but the revolver comes down on top of his wrist, very fast, and Janos knows that a bone has been broken.
Not until then does he look into Murphy’s blue eyes, eyes the color of the sky on a hazy day. Janos steps back, banging into the car behind him, and Murphy says, “Where’s Rafferty?”
Janos says, “Who?”
