“Oh,” I said. “You want to talk with me about that too.”
“Come on, come on,” he said and flashed his coat open to show me the gun on his belt.
“Show me that again,” I said.
He opened his coat again and I hit him a gorgeous left hand in the V under his ribs where the sternum ends. It paralyzed his diaphragm and he gasped and doubled over and then pitched forward onto the sidewalk. Curly’s hand went inside the jacket toward his left armpit and the driver of the Pontiac threw open the door on his side and came out of the car. I looped my right fist overhand in a movement that developed out of the left to the stomach and hit Curly square on the nose. Blood came at once. He had the gun half out of the holster, his hand still under the jacket, when I grabbed his wrist with my left hand and held his gun hand against his chest, the gun caught under the jacket, and I hit him twice more with my right, square in the nose. He sagged and I shoved him away, ducking as I did so, feeling the driver more than seeing him. He had his gun out and brought it to rest on the roof of the car, his door swinging wide into the street, when the gray Plymouth swung in beside the Pontiac and picked the driver off and the open door and scattered them onto Lake Shore Drive. I ducked around the Pontiac and jumped in on the passenger side of the Plymouth.
“You want to run over the other two,” Hawk said.
I shook my head and Hawk pulled the Plymouth away and we headed down the Drive.
I said, “Did you take the insurance option when you rented this thing?”
“Sure,” Hawk said, “but since I used a fake ID and a phony credit card, I don’t guess it make a big difference.”
“There’s that,” I said.
Hawk pulled onto North Michigan Avenue. “Those folks from Costigan?” he said.
“Yes. Said they were going to talk with me about fucking around where I have no business fucking around.”
“You explain that your profession?” Hawk said.
“I was going to,” I said, “but he kept showing me his gun and frightening me.”
Hawk turned right onto Ontario Street heading for the Kennedy Expressway.
“Find out anything from the broad?” Hawk said. “You in there long enough.”
“It took her a while,” I said. “Something I learned that I didn’t expect to, she loves the son of a bitch. She hates him too, but she loves him.”
“Don’t care about who loves him and who don’t,” Hawk said. We pulled up onto the Kennedy heading for O’Hare Airport. “She got any idea where he might be?”
“Yeah,” I said and told him, in sequence, just what Tyler Costigan had told me. Telling him that way helped me sort through and see if there was anything that I hadn’t noticed first time through. Hawk listened silently, driving with the barest movement of his hands, his eyes steady on the road.
“Connecticut,” he said when I was through. “Christ. We should have enrolled in one of those frequent flyer programs when this started. Get ourselves a free trip to Dallas or something.”
“Second prize is two free trips to Dallas,” I said.
CHAPTER 27
PEQUOD STANDS ON THE FARMINGTON RIVER, twenty miles west of Hartford in a green hilly section of Connecticut. There was a small bend in the river and as you came around a curve in the road that hugged the river, there it was. A three-story brick building with a cupola on the roof, a restaurant on the first floor with some hanging plants in the window. There was also a Sunoco station, a Cumberland Farms convenience store made as rustic as a Cumberland Farms was likely to get, with texture 1-11 plywood siding stained gray. Across from the restaurant was another threestory brick building. No cupola this time, but across the second story an open balcony ran the length of the building. There were two or three white Victorian-vintage houses with wide verandas that sat on the small slope that ran up from the road, and then you were through Pequod, and the hills and the river were all there was again.
“Look like a dynamite liberty port,” Hawk said.
“Throbbing,” I said.
“Only thing they don’t seem to have is a…” Hawk flipped open the manila folder on his lap and read from Rachel Wallace’s notes. “Diversified Weapons Fabrication and Testing Facility.”
“A subsidiary of Transpan International,” I said. Five miles past Pequod we turned left at a sign that said DEVILS KINGDOM, with an arrow, and crossed the river on a small bridge. Instead of paving, the roadbed of the bridge was made of crisscrossed steel bars, rather like a grating, so that if you looked straight down out the side window you could see the river moving below.
Coming off the bridge the road forked, the main macadam two-lane highway stretching straight north toward Massachusetts, a smaller road veering left along the river and disappearing in a copse of sugar maples. We went along the small road. Past the trees a plain stretched out north from the river and on it stood a long cinderblock building, a small frame building, and perhaps six Quonset huts painted gray. A chain link fence stood ten feet high, topped with razor wire, around the buildings. At each corner was a watchtower.
“Look like a prison,” Hawk said.
“Transpan International,” I said. “Unless Rachel Wallace is badly confused.”
“I bet she ain’t,” Hawk said.
We drove slowly past. There was a large gate with a guard shack beside it. Beyond the fenced area there was a firing range and past that something that looked like it might be an obstacle course that led into the woods. There was no one on the range but there was movement on the obstacle course; people in camouflage fatigues ran and jumped among the trees, hard to see through the foliage at a distance.
Hawk watched silently as we drove past. “Fire on the range,” he said, “run the obstacle course, that get you a
