Eliot was dancing with his girl, Ev, an attractive brunette in her mid-twenties; Wild liked her, but she was a little quiet for his tastes. But then so was Eliot, for that matter. After all, the guy was a bit on the dull side.
Not in terms of brains, of course. Wild considered Ness about the savviest detective he knew, or anyway the savviest honest one he knew. And he was well aware that Ness had led-and continued to lead-a life filled with the sort of adventure and danger that little boys dreamed would one day be theirs.
Maybe that was the problem. Maybe Eliot continued to be a little kid living out a Sherlock Holmes/Rover Boys fantasy. The man seemed, in certain respects, oddly naive to Wild. An innocent dedicated to tracking down the guilty.
Vivian brought two Bacardi’s over, set one of them in front of Wild, and smiled.
'You are alone tonight, aren't you?'
'Oh, yeah,' Wild said. 'I rarely come out to these things, with or without female company. I don't know how I let Eliot talk me into joining this silly-ass sewing circle in the first place.'
'I heard he got you a complimentary membership,' Viv said, smiling wickedly. 'Like his.'
'Here's to friends in high places,' Wild said, smiling crookedly, toasting glasses with her, 'and the fringe benefits they bring.'
'Well, now that you're hobnobbing in society circles,' she said, 'if you want to hold out for a dame in an evening gown, I'd understand. You'll have to take me come-as-I-are. I just had to get an extra nine holes in.'
'Yeah, well if you were looking for a guy in a tux,' Wild said, 'I'm not it, either. And I've never been on a golf course in my life. What else do we have in common?'
She had a nicely wry smile, which continued as she sipped the Bacardi. 'Eliot, I suppose.'
'We're both undercover agents of his, in a way,' Wild said.
'Each in our own way, of course,' she said.
'There's a double entendre in there somewhere that I'd better not go looking for.'
Her smile turned melancholy. 'Maybe I wish you would, Sam.'
The band began playing a tango.
Pretty soon, Ness came over to see how Wild and Vivian were getting along, while Vivian and Ev were both in the powder room.
'What's this Kingsbury Run party I'm not invited to?' Wild asked.
'It's private.'
'More private than the country club?'
'Yes. You can only attend if you're a bum or a cop.'
'There's a difference?'
'Sometimes not,' Ness admitted. 'Here comes Viv. Keep her entertained for me.'
'Gee, I'll do my best.'
Wild and Vivian sat at a table on the terrace and talked about her 'undercover agent' days.
'Things have slowed to a boring halt,' she said nostalgically. 'Eliot doesn't want to use me anymore.'
That had an ambiguous ring.
'An undercover agent can only be effective so long,' Wild said. 'Pretty soon the other side gets suspicious.'
'I gave him something big this afternoon,' she said almost bitterly, 'and he just shrugged it off'.' Then she shrugged it off herself, with resigned frustration, and let Wild, who was wondering about the 'something big' she mentioned, buy the next round.
They took a walk in the dark, around the golf course, and ended up sitting on a green. Wild liked the breeze almost as much as he liked Viv. The flag on the hole-13- flapped.
'Thirteen,' he said.
'Huh?'
'Victim thirteen.'
'Oh. Yes. Today. It's a goddamned shame.'
'A goddamned shame,' he agreed.
'Shame they haven't found the son of a bitch and killed his ass. If that stubborn prick Eliot High-and-Mighty Ness would just listen to me…'
She was a little drunk, and so was Wild, but it still surprised and amused him to hear a woman, particularly a society' woman, speak that way.
'Viv, you wouldn't happen to still be in love with that lucky bastard, would you?'
She seemed taken aback for a minute, then her face wrinkled into a got-caught-with-her-pants-down grin. Maybe a little. But he's got a girl.'
'I don't.'
'You might.'
She leaned forward.
They kissed for a while, and she felt good in his arms;. he was firm, almost muscular. But she smelled like flowers, and the sky was midnight blue and scattered with stars above them, as they lay back on the golf green to look up. Even to a man as cynical as Sam Wild, it seemed like a nice world, at the moment.
Long as you didn't recall it had a Butcher in it.
CHAPTER 16
Only the green and red switch lights along the railroad tracks disturbed the perfect blackness of the night. Only the gurgling pulse of the underground sewers broke the between-trains silence. Three hours before dawn, Kingsbury Run was a blot in the city's midst. In the two shantytowns of the Run-the crowded one off Commerce and Canal, the slightly smaller but more sprawling one near the Thirty-fifth Street Bridge-hobos and down-and-outers slept in their shacks. No fires remained lit in either camp in these early hours of the predawn morning to keep away bugs or butchers. The darkness seemed to shield the shantytowns' very existence from civilization proper.
On the street above the hillside where the larger shantytown nestled, a fire engine glided almost silently into place. Already parked on nearby streets of the Flats were eleven unmarked police cars. Five police vans, called paddy wagons by some, Black Marias by others, sat silently, each tended by a driver and a jailer. Twenty-five cops-a dozen plainclothes, a dozen uniformed, and the man in charge-were massed on the street above the hill like a small army. Their commander in chief was the city's safety director, who wore a dark suit and no hat. He had a revolver in one hand and an oversize, switched-off flashlight in the other.
'Bob,' Ness said quietly to the man at his side, 'get your men into position.'
Robert Chamberlin nodded and broke off with nine other plainclothes men; in the midst of a huddle, tall, mustached, lantern-jawed Chamberlin-a man with considerable military bearing-was pointing in various directions into the darkness as if he could see into it, and men were nodding, looking back where he was pointing, as if they could, too.
Earlier, just after one A.M., all of these men had met at the fire department headquarters at the east end of the Central Viaduct, where Ness had briefed them, mapping out the raid in detail.
Chamberlin's men divided up and a few took positions along the top of this hillside, and the rest, with Chamberlin, disappeared down the ridged slope, veering this way and that, into the darkness. Like Ness, each man had a gun in one hand and a flashlight in the other-though their flashlights were not oversize, clublike objects like that of the safety directors. Each was taking up a post at various approaches to the raiding zone; this would, Ness hoped, prevent any alarm from being given and keep anyone from entering or departing the shantytown.
He didn't like all this brandishing of guns; but he'd figured the conspicuous presence of firearms, in the hands of men who'd been warned to be anything but trigger-happy, would help keep order among the army of hobos whose camp they were about to invade. Only the plainclothesmen would carry guns: the uniformed cops would be threatening enough in badges and blue and nightsticks-on-belts.
Ness broke the remaining men up into groups of five, putting Merlo in charge of one squad and Curry in charge of the other, and sent them off to the right and left, keeping four men with him.
Several minutes crept by, of which Ness could feel every slow second. The blackness below seemed to have
