Down Here

Or a piece of it, anyway. Some development deal.

“All Wychek’s got to do is make sure he’s not followed. If he told her the truth—that nobody knows where he is now— shouldn’t be any problem for him.”

“And she wants to just bring you along?” Michelle asked. “Like a little surprise?”

“No. What she wants is just for me to stand by, close. Once she meets him, she’s going to pitch the idea of him doing the interview with me. For the book. If he says ‘okay,’ she’ll call and wave me in.”

“No chance you make that dance, son.”

“That’s true, Prof. But she can’t know that.”

“Why does she do it, then, mahn?”

“She’s gotten more and more . . . I don’t know the word for it. She keeps trying to ‘prove’ something to me. Like if I thought she was for real I’d . . . be with her, I guess.”

“So you think all this cloak-and-dagger is so she can say, ‘I tried, honey’?” Michelle.

“You tell me.”

“Well, she is a woman. And having a freak in your family doesn’t make you one,” my little sister said. “We all know that song. By heart.”

^“Guy down here, boss.”

“Seen him before?”

“Yeah. The lumberjack.”

“Let him pass, Gateman.”

^“I’m in.”

“In what, Mick?” I asked.

“What you’re doing,” he said, his glance covering all of us, seated around the poker table.

“It’s over,” I told him. “Like Wolfe said.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You looking to join for the coin?” the Prof asked suspiciously.

“There’s only one thing I care about in all this,” Mick said, eyes just for me. “Same as you.”

Nobody said anything, waiting.

“And I don’t trust the fucking feds,” Mick said. “Same as you.”

Thursday, 3:22 a.m. The building was two stories of solid brick, standing squat and square, as if daring anyone to ask it to move.

By the time we finished offloading, the Prof had seduced the lock.

We left him just inside the door, cradling his scattergun. I led the way up the stairs, a five-cell flash in one hand, a short-barreled .357 Magnum in the other. Clarence was just behind me, to my right. As soon as we cleared the area, Max and Mick brought up the gear.

Except for a thin film of interior dust, the place was immaculately clean, as if a former tenant had swept up before moving on.

We set up camp on the top floor. Clarence started to unpack methodically. Max and Mick went around making sure we had more than one way out. I took care of setting up observation posts, carefully using a box cutter to make eye-slits in the blackout curtains we hung behind the boarded windows.

“No people, no food, and it’s nice and warm out,” the Prof muttered, looking around. “So the miserable little motherfuckers got business elsewhere.” The Prof hated rats.

By daybreak, we were ready to start sleeping in shifts.

^“I say he gets here first,” the Prof whispered to me.

“Michelle put the padlock back in place behind us,” I said. “And only the sister has the key.”

“What time’s the meet?”

“Midnight.”

“I got a century to a dime the cocksucker gets here by eleven-thirty, minimum.”

I was still considering the offer when Max slapped a ten-dollar bill on top of one of the duffel bags.

^“Pssst!”

“You got him?”

“Got somebody, mahn. This scope makes everything green, but it’s a man, walking.”

“Alone?”

“Yes,” Clarence said. “Closing now.”

The Prof snatched Max’s ten and his hundred off the top of the duffel bag in one lightning move. Then he and the Mongol took off downstairs. Mick was already there, waiting.

Thirteen minutes later.

“You’re not feds,” Wychek said, despite my dark-blue suit, white shirt, and wine-colored tie. If being stripped, handcuffed to a pipe, and surrounded by the men who had choked him into unconsciousness and carried him up the stairs frightened him, it didn’t show on his face.

“Good guess,” I said.

“And you’re not with . . .”

“With who, John?” I said, pleasantly, not a trace of urgency in my voice.

“Oh no,” he said, lips twisting in a stalker’s smile.

“When did you last take your medication, John?”

“Just before I— What difference does that make?”

“You know why I asked,” I said, very softly.

“I don’t—”

“Ssshhh,” I said, soothingly. “We’re already here. You know what that means.”

“If anything happens to me—”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you, John. But we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t know who else was coming.”

“She doesn’t have it,” he said, smoothly. “She doesn’t even know where it is.”

“One of those is a lie, John. Maybe, maybe it was true that first time, on Forty- ninth. But it’s not true now. Not tonight. So, the way we see it, all we have to do is wait. Soon as she shows up, we won’t need you anymore.”

“The feds know where I am. If anything—”

“You said that already, John. That’s why we took your clothes. To make sure you didn’t have any way to stay in touch.”

Wychek watched me blank-faced, same as he had watched dozens of social workers and therapists and cops and prison guards for a lot of years. His other face only came out under a ski mask.

He hadn’t been carrying a cell phone. No tape recorder, no body mike.

But he had his straight razor. And a roll of duct tape.

I walked around in a little circle, as if I was making up my mind. Finally, said, “You want to know what this is about, John? What it’s really about?”

“Yeah. Because if you think—”

“It’s about money,” I said, moving closer to him. “And you’re going to—”

Clarence stepped into the room, chopped off my speech with a hand gesture. I followed him out of the room, over to where he had an observation slot.

A silver Audi TT convertible pulled up to the front of the building. Its headlights went out. Just as Laura Reinhardt opened her door, I caught a flicker of movement at the edge of the lot.

I gestured to Max and the Prof, pointing two fingers down, forked. They took off.

“Big SUV,” Clarence said, watching through the scope. “Coming on.”

“I’ll cover you from up here,” I said, and went back to where we had Wychek trussed up.

“This is so you don’t hear or see what’s going on,” I said, a doctor explaining a medical procedure to a nervous patient. “Just breathe through your nose,” I told him, very softly.

“Do not panic,” I cautioned him, just before I fitted a set of sound-canceling earphones in place. “We’re all going to be busy for a few minutes. You have yourself a seizure now, it’s your last.”