twenties, though there was experience in that hard face. He wore a glen plaid brown suit that had a tailored look and a silk green-and-brown striped tie; he was a natty son of a bitch, for a guy training my own .38 on me. Well, the elevator operator’s .38.
“You don’t have to die,” he said.
This was not the voice I’d heard on the telephone: so there was at least one more of them…probably the other mustached assassin, the smaller, round-faced one.
“Sooner or later, we all do,” I said.
That snake charmer music was still playing, distantly, over scratchy speakers.
The mustache curled into a small smile. “Well…it can be sooner, if you insist. You got what I want?”
He meant the Drury notebooks. I hefted the duffel bag.
“That’s it?” he asked, eyebrows raised.
“It’s not gym clothes,” I said. Truthfully.
Her eyes agonized now, Jackie—tied tight in her chair—was looking back and forth between us, as if she were following a tennis match with life-and-death consequences. Maybe she was.
As he pointed the .38 at me with one hand, he reached his other hand into a suitcoat pocket. Then he tossed something, which clunked on the wooden floor at Jackie’s feet. A pocket-knife—a good-size one.
“You give me what’s in that bag,” he said, “and I’ll just go. And by the time you cut the little junkie loose, I’ll be long gone. You’ll have what you want, I’ll have what I want.”
“Where’s your partner?”
A tiny shrug. “He might be anywhere. Maybe he’s up on top of the Pair-O-Chutes. Maybe he’s sitting in a ferris wheel car.”
“Somewhere he can shoot me from, you mean.”
But the pale Apache was shaking his head. “We don’t want to shoot you.”
Fuck him—I’d witnessed him and his partner killing Bas. I hadn’t come forward about what I’d seen, but the threat of my doing so still hung over them—which was part of why we were here at Riverview tonight, besides the fun and games of Aladdin’s Castle. To remove that threat.
The only thing keeping me alive was their need to get what they thought I had: the Drury papers.
“All right,” I said to him, as Jackie looked at me with affection and desperation in those big brown eyes. “I suppose if you wanted to shoot me, I’d be dead by now.”
“That’s right,” he said, accepting that as my actual line of thinking.
“You mind if I ask you who you’re working for?”
“Just give me the damn bag, okay?”
I held out the duffel bag, assertively—right out in front of Jackie’s face. “Take it, then. Fucking take it!”
The pale Apache winced in thought. Too much thinking is bad for some people. But it was clear he now figured I’d booby-trapped the bag somehow…maybe put a real cobra in it. After all, we had snake charmer music playing in the background….
He sneered at me; natty as he was, that mustache could use a trim. “You open it—slowly. Show me everything that’s in there, one item at a time…make a pile on the floor.”
“Okay.” I pretended to be trying to juggle the bag into a workable position. I gave him a frustrated look, saying, “Can I put the bag down?”
Sighing with impatience, he nodded.
I crouched and unzipped the duffel bag; he was watching me carefully, the gun poised to blow me away at the slightest sign of treachery. My hand found the .32 and I fired it up at him through some newspapers and the canvas of the bag itself, which muffled the sound almost as well as a silencer, and the son of a bitch never had time to realize what had happened, much less squeeze the trigger of the .38.
He just stood there for a moment, with the little blue hole in the middle of his forehead, like a third eye, and his other two eyes weren’t seeing any better than the new one; reflexes severed, his body flopped like a stringless puppet right about where I was supposed to pile the notebooks and tapes. The splash of blood and brains on the wooden wall behind him would have looked fine in a frame at Fischetti’s penthouse.
Jackie had an astonished expression—not as astonished as that dead mustached fucker, but astonished enough. He fell at her feet, so I shoved him aside to get at that pocket-knife, and flipped it open and started cutting her loose— the guy had played fair, providing a nice sharp blade, and I was able to free her within a minute…though that minute seemed like an eternity, since I couldn’t be sure the shot…however muffled…might not have carried well enough for the partner to hear.
With the ropes in a pile at her bare feet, Jackie stood—she weaved for a moment, put a hand to her head; she seemed groggy.
“You okay?” I said, slipping an arm around her waist. I’d already retrieved the .38 from my late host, the .32 consigned to a jacket pocket. “Can you make it, baby?”
She nodded, tugging her sleeve down over the bruises and tracks, and I went to that control box and found a switch in the OFF position labeled HOUSE LIGHTS, and another in the ON that said MASTER GIMMICK; I hit both switches, and when I walked her out of there, occasional bare work bulbs unmasked the mysterious corridor of Aladdin’s Castle as unpainted plywood. With my arm still around her waist, we moved down a sloping ramp that I seemed to remember would take us out.
The exit awaiting us was one of those big rolling barrels, so awkward to navigate without falling comically ass over teakettle; but it wasn’t rolling now. Before we could duck through it into the night, I paused, kissed her forehead, looked into those dazed-looking brown eyes, and said, “His partner’s out there, somewhere.”
