The Silent Hour

“Of course.”

“You know you’ve been lying to me?”

“What?”

“For three days you’ve been lying to me. Said you’d given up on the surveillance, stopped going out there— and, unlike you with Ken, I don’t understand why.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think of it as lying, even though it was. I just knew that you and Joe thought I should quit—”

“You told us you already had. Back in the summer, it was you who said you were done. Emphatically. Neither of us told you to give up your job, Lincoln, but you did, and then you went back to it in secret. Lying about it. I don’t understand.”

I didn’t know how to make her understand. I couldn’t explain to her that she was one of the reasons I’d had to quit, that Ken’s murder had been one that hit too close to home. It could be her next time. Or Joe. My decision at the garage today had been made the moment the guy on the stool had reached under his jacket with his eyes on Joe. I understood some things in that moment, understood just how damn close we were to the one thing I could never allow to happen again. I would not bring those I loved into harm’s way again. I couldn’t.

So if I understood that, then why couldn’t I stop altogether? Why had I ever gone back to that damned house in the woods with my camera and my binoculars?

I didn’t have an answer for that one. It chilled me, but I didn’t. I’d ended up back out there, that was all. The absence of resolution, of truth, had tormented me for too many months. In the end, it won. I was weaker than I’d thought.

“Let me ask you one more thing, and this time, if you care about me at all, tell me the truth,” Amy said. She was speaking very carefully, slowly, as if she needed me to feel the weight of the words. “If you don’t tell me the truth, we’re done, Lincoln. We will have to be done. Because I can’t live with you otherwise.”

“Ask the question,” I said.

“Are you really going to pass this off to Graham, or are you telling one thing to me and Joe and planning another?”

I looked away.

She said, “Lincoln.”

“I’ve got something left to do,” I said. “That’s the truth. It’s something I’m going to do alone. Then I will give this to Graham and, yes, step away. I promise you, that is the truth. I’ve got one thing left to do.”

“What is it?”

“I’m going to get Graham the tape he wanted me to get from Harrison, only this time I’ll get it from the right source. I’m going to get him evidence, Amy, get him a case he can prosecute, a case that will end the right way. I don’t want to pass this off to him until I know it’s ready for that. I can’t stand to let it fall apart the way it did with Dunbar and Mike London and Graham and everyone else. Do you understand that? I can’t let it fall apart again.”

She fell asleep around midnight. I sat beside her in the dark, looking at a pale shaft of light across the carpet that I liked to imagine was the moon but was really from a parking lot light pole. She had not pressed me for more details of what I had planned, and I hadn’t offered them. It had been a quiet night. We didn’t make love or even talk when we turned out the lights and got into bed, but she fell asleep with her hand wrapped tight around my arm.

After twenty minutes, when her breathing had slowed to the rhythm of true and deep sleep, I got to my feet and found my car keys. She was on her side, face turned into the pillow, and before I left I leaned down and kissed the back of her head, smelled her hair. Then I walked through the dark apartment and opened the door and stepped out into the night. There was no way I could fasten the steel security bar behind me. I regretted that.

I stopped at a convenience store on Rocky River and bought a large black coffee, then drove home, went upstairs, and found the wire I’d used in the early stages with Parker Harrison. I’d never taken it back to the office. We’d had no use for it anymore.

I tested it and then put it on, clipping the microphone lower, near the fourth button instead of the first, remembering the way Harrison had torn at my shirt, how completely exposed it had been then. Once the wire was in place, I got my gun case out of the closet and removed the stainless steel Beretta 9 mm. It had been a while since I’d handled that gun, but I had a shoulder holster for it, and I put that on now and slipped the Beretta inside. I put a jacket on over that, leaving it unzipped, and then I put the Glock into its holster, this one secured on my spine. The East Cleveland Ensemble.

With that preparation complete, I turned off the lights and left the apartment and went to the office. I fired up the computer and then took my PI license out of my wallet and went to the scanner, made a copy of the image and loaded it onto the computer, and made a few changes before printing out a copy. A little trimming work with scissors, a quick pass through the card laminator I’d purchased years ago for just this sort of thing, and then I was done. I tucked the new ID into my wallet in place of the old one, left the office, and drove back to Eddy Road.

42

__________

One version of the neighborhood came to life at dawn, and another went to sleep. It hadn’t been a quiet night of surveillance—I’d watched people stumble the sidewalks wrecked out of their minds, seen a fistfight flare and then vanish when a police cruiser drove by, heard the laughter and loud car stereos of those returning from a night at the clubs. That world slid away just before daylight, and then the traffic thickened and stores and businesses opened as the sun rose.

Classic Auto Body was quiet until almost nine, and then someone drove into the parking lot in a sleek black Cadillac CTS and pulled to a stop just outside of the office window, in an area not marked for parking. The driver’s door opened and a large black man stepped out with keys in his hand. He unlocked the office door and disappeared inside.

I pushed the blackout curtain aside and climbed into the front seat of the truck and then got out and walked to the shop, tested the door and found it unlocked, and stepped inside.

I’d entered an empty office, but I could hear movement in the garage beyond, someone walking around snapping on light switches. A few seconds passed, and then the door from the garage opened and the Cadillac’s driver stepped back into the office and saw me.

“You need help?” he said, not unfriendly, but not thrilled about seeing me there, either.

“Got a couple questions about a car you did.”

“Yeah?” He walked around the desk and leaned on its edge, more intrigued now. “Like what you’ve seen out there, huh?”

“Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.”

He was nodding along in agreement, confident in his work. “You got something classic you working on, or is it more of just getting it done up right, something newer but just don’t have that look, that style?”

He appeared even bigger indoors than he had outside. Probably six-four and at least two hundred and sixty or seventy pounds, with a block of a head above a football lineman’s shoulders. He looked about forty-five and had a pencil-line beard tracing his massive jaw. Wore baggy jeans and a black jacket open over a T-shirt. There was a chain of white gold or platinum with a glittering medallion in the shape of a diamond around his neck, hanging halfway down his chest.

“I’ve got some pictures of it,” I said, pulling Dunbar’s photographs out of my pocket. I nodded at his medallion before I handed them over. “That diamond there, any chance that’s, like, your logo?”

“Yeah, man, like a signature, you know? Every artist puts one on their work.” He was smiling at me now. “Keeps people from passing off their shit as mine, too. You got these kids, do something on their own, then they want people to think they spent the money, right? Want them to think they got the money