“You can listen on the plane. Charlie tells it better than I do.”
I paid the tab and we retrieved her car.
“Can’t I even go home for some clothes?”
“I wouldn’t. Not just yet.”
“How long am I supposed to hide out like this?”
“Not forever. If something doesn’t happen after a while, I’ll force his hand.”
We made a quick swing by my hotel, got my stuff, and headed toward the airport.
“Is the tape player still in the box?”
“Yep. It’s even got earphones.”
We didn’t say any more till the unmistakable signs of runways and aviation rose up around us. She went to long- term parking and we got a shuttle to the terminal.
“What do you really think they’ll do about us?”
“I don’t know. Dante’s an animal. I gave him my best shot.”
“What do you think, though?”
In the end I still didn’t know. “Maybe it’s fifty-fifty. If I had to lay money…I don’t know. I’m just glad you’re getting out of here.”
We got on standby to Atlanta. From there we could get passage on Soapbox Airways to the coast.
“You must put on the world’s greatest bluff,” she said at some point.
But my silence told another story.
“You weren’t bluffing.”
“You don’t bluff a guy like Dante.”
“You would kill him.”
“He’s lucky he’s still alive and I hope he knows it.”
“What about your other promise?”
“He’d better believe that one too.” I looked at her sadly, hating the notion that I was becoming a tarnished hero. “Don’t ask questions if you don’t want to know the answers, Koko.”
“How do you know people like that? People you can just call up and order someone killed?”
“Please,” I said impatiently. “I am not a friend of killers. We’re talking about an old boyhood chum. He went his way, I went mine, but he still thinks he owes me. Something that happened long ago when we were kids. Maybe now I’ll let him get that off his chest.”
After a while I said, “I’m not ordering Dante killed. He’ll be fine as long as we’re fine. If anything happens to him, he does it to himself.”
But I still didn’t call Vinnie. Something in my heart wouldn’t let me.
Instead I called Erin and got her answering machine. “Hi,” I said. “I’m out of town. Not sure when I’ll be back, but we need to talk. Leave a message on my machine.”
No jokes this time around.
An hour later Koko and I looked down on the East Coast from 35,000 feet. She got out the player and rigged me up, picking among half a dozen fat folders and two dozen recorded tapes until she found what she wanted. “This is the best one. This is Charlie. All we’ll ever have of him.”
The tape began to play—an old man’s voice, recounting the times of his life. An old man’s voice, but as I listened the tone sounded vaguely familiar.
“Is that…
“Just listen. She’s trying to tell us what he told her—and what she read in his journal years ago.”
I looked at her.
“There’s nothing supernatural about this. Jo was in a deep trance that day. And this is what he told her. This is it, word for word. It’s been stored there in her head for eighty years. She’s even trying to tell it in his voice.”
“What’d she say when you played it back for her?”
“Nothing. She just cried.”
