“I loaded him,” said Neal.
He gently laid the unconscious Withers on the floor and took the briefcase out of his hand. Setting it on the bar, he said, “If you’re squeamish about felonies, you might not want to watch this.”
The nice thing about metal, Neal thought, is that it trains itself to the touch. After the owner dials the same combination a few hundred times, the dials simply respond to the touch and go right to the required numbers. Unless, of course, the owner changes the combination every month or so, which is what Walter Withers had apparently done, because the dials refused to cooperate.
“Impressive,” Brogan muttered as he handed Neal a screwdriver.
“Thank you,” Neal answered. There was nothing like having an unconscious victim, all the time in the world, and no need for secrecy. It was also nice not to have Joe Graham there to observe and make sarcastic comments. He ripped the lock open with the surgical delicacy of a stockyard butcher.
“Shit on toast,” Brogan said.
“Yep,” Neal agreed.
The briefcase was full of real cash. No outfit in the business would use this amount of real money as a prop. Neal figured that Withers’s original story about Top Drawer magazine had been the truth, or as close to the truth as one ever came in a scam like this.
“I ain’t gonna ask,” Brogan said.
“Thanks,” Neal answered. “If you can help me get him up, I think I can carry him across the street. Leave his keys on the bar; he can get them in the morning.”
Brogan came around the bar and helped lift Withers into a fireman’s carry over Neal’s shoulder.
“What if he comes back tonight?” Brogan asked.
Neal answered, “I doubt he’s going to come to soon, but if he comes back in, shoot him.”
“Never shot a man wearing a tie before,” Brogan observed as Neal staggered out of the bar.
Neal crossed the street and walked over to the motel. He knew that the door to the office-a double-wide trailer-would be unlocked. He went in, leaned Withers against the wall, and reached into the large Maxwell House can on a wooden shelf and pulled out a key. He took a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet and put it in the can. Hefting Withers over his shoulder, he crossed the gravel parking lot, let himself into room number four, and flopped the old detective down on the bed. He loosened Withers’s tie and maneuvered his jacket off him.
Withers started to snore.
Neal took the opportunity to go through Withers’s jacket. There were a few loose bills in his wallet, a driver’s license, and an American Express card. Tucked under the bills were some slips of papers with names and phone numbers… Ron Scarpelli… Sammy Black… and someone named Gloria, whose phone number was the same as Neal and Karen’s.
Neal put the wallet back and hung the jacket up.
He found a pad by the telephone and wrote, “Walter, a cheery good morning. I have your briefcase for safekeeping-both ours and yours. I guess you know where to call. You make any other calls and you can kiss the money good-bye.”
He left the note on the pillow.
Overtime woke up and for a single second didn’t know where he was. Then he recalled parking the car off a dirt road on the outskirts of town to get a little sleep. He needed the sleep to achieve sufficient clarity of thought.
Point one: Nobody at the target location had actually seen him, so his person was secure.
Point two: They might have seen the car, so the car was dangerous. He would have to acquire a new vehicle.
Point three: A question, a dangerous unknown. Who were the people who had come in behind him? Were they still in the house? Was the target still in the house?
The terrain has shifted, Overtime thought. The fog of battle has descended. The tactical situation was unclear.
So what to do? The cautious option would be to withdraw, to find a new staging area and contact the client. Advantage: Safety. Disadvantage: Acknowledgment of failure. Damage to reputation. Fresh contact with client.
It was one of his prime rules: Each contact with the client represents a danger of exposure-telephones tapped, tapes rolling, voiceprints tracking.
Reduce client contact to the minimum. Contact client only when absolutely necessary.
Question: Was it now necessary?
Analysis: You are in a small, remote town where individuals attract attention. The target may be at least aware that there is an exposure.
Question: Where is that idiotic private investigator, the oblivious screen?
Further analysis: The target may be deceived that the exposure has already occurred or been diverted. It is nighttime. The approach to the potential target area is simple and without risk. The escape from target area presents few problems-with a different vehicle.
Analysis: The situation is unclear but not without possibilities.
Decision: While disadvantages do exist, the overall gain, predicated on the acquisition of a new vehicle, suggests an attempt.
He got back in the car and headed for town.
12
To the best of his recollection, Neal Carey had never taken LSD.
But he questioned this when he stepped back into the house, because the scene in front of him resembled everything he’d ever heard about an acid flashback.
The first weird and twisted hallucination that met his eyes was a distorted version of Candy Landis sitting on a chair in his kitchen. Her formerly sculpted blond hair was… big… BIG… teased into a high, wild golden forest of sprayed and moussed branches.
Neal looked more closely to see whether he could recognize Mrs. Landis’s face beneath the mascara, rouge, pancake, and something wild and electric blue that sparkled on her eyelids.
Yeah… he thought tentatively, that was her in there. That was her mouth beneath the frosted hot-pink lipstick highlighted with brown pencil. Those were her fingers touching her mouth, her fingers with the scarlet stiletto fake nails.
Despite his best effort, Neal’s eyes wandered downward, pulled by the sheer magnetic force of the black lace undergarment that peeked above one of Polly’s red silk blouses. Gone was the prim white blouse with the bow tied at the chin. The top three buttons of the red silk were undone, showing the black bra that performed its structural function of producing-what was the term? — cleavage. Right, cleavage that revealed freckles on Mrs. Landis’s chest. The freckles gave her a sort of vulnerable sweetness.
“Quit staring at her boobs and tell us what you think,” Polly demanded.
Neal looked up and decided that he must be having a nervous breakdown, because there was another hallucination, this one more bizarre than the first. Polly Paget-at least he thought it was Polly-was standing behind Mrs. Landis with a comb in her hair, apparently trying to produce an even taller tower of hair. But this Polly… No, it couldn’t be Polly, because this woman’s hair had been washed, brushed to a shine, and cut so it hung thick and straight above her neck. Her hair was parted high on one side and then flipped over her forehead.
And this woman wore makeup so subtle that you could barely tell she had any on. Neal could actually see her eyes, which were even sexier without the accoutrement. And she was wearing one of her denim shirts over jeans. She looked like a tall, modern Joan of Arc with a sex drive.
“What?!” Polly demanded, blushing. She thought she looked good, but she just wasn’t sure yet.
Her face flushed and Neal realized that he was staring.
He looked around the table to Karen, who was elbow-deep in a half-gallon carton of Haagen-Dazs chocolate- chocolate chip. She picked up a can of Reddi Wip, sprayed it onto the ice cream, and dug in her spoon.
