“No,” Hawk said.
“I didn’t think I did,” Belson said. He stood up. “You folks going to be all right for a while by yourselves?”
“Who knows we’re here besides you and Quirk?”
“Nobody.”
“Let’s keep it that way,” I said.
“What do I tell Ives?”
“Tell him you don’t know,” I said.
“Lie?” Belson said. “To the representatives of a federal agency?”
“Yes,” I said.
“My pleasure,” Belson said.
“Tell Ives I’ll call him.”
Belson nodded. “Better clean those pieces,” he said. “Salt water will raise hell with them.”
He took Susan’s hand and squeezed it. She kissed him on the cheek. He said, “Ms. Wallace.”
Rachel Wallace said, “Thank you, Sergeant,” and Belson went out.
Hawk and I showered and put on clean clothes. Then I called Ives.
“Where the hell are you,” he said.
“Shangri-la,” I said. “Somebody in your organization is talking.”
“Impossible,” Ives said.
“Some people knew where we were, knew we had reason to look for Costigan, knew the phone number at the safe house.”
“Perhaps the maiden has made some phone calls,” Ives said.
“Her name is Ms. Silverman,” I said. “If you call her maiden again I am going to put you in the hospital. Also if you call me Lochinvar. Some asshole in your asshole operation is on Costigan’s string.”
“Your threats don’t scare me,” Ives said. “And I can’t run an operation like this without keeping track of the agents.”
“My threats should scare you, and you will have to learn to run this operation without keeping track of us. We’ll find Costigan, and we’ll kill him like we said we would. But we’ll do it without telling you where we are. Because you will probably run it live on the Today show.”
I hung up.
Hawk had broken down the two .357’s and was wiping them down with baby oil.
“Ives ain’t happy ‘bout us going underground,” he said.
“I think that’s right,” I said.
“We need him to get off the hook in California,” Hawk said.
“We’ll do what he wants done,” I said. “And he’s too far into this to pull out now.”
“‘Cause we’d blow the whistle on him?”
“Yes.”
Hawk nodded. “So we on our own,” he said.
“Who better,” I said.
Rachel Wallace was sitting on the bed with her briefcase open beside her on the bed.
“Perhaps we should begin,” she said, “by learning a bit more about our adversary.”
“Can we eat and drink while we do it?” I said.
“Certainly.”
I ordered some sandwiches and beer from room service, and Hawk reassembled and loaded one of the newly cleaned .357’s and stood just inside the door in the other room when the waiter came. I paid him in cash and he went away.
“Whose name we under,” I said.
“I don’t know,” Susan said. “Frank simply brought us here and opened the door with a key.”
“We’ll move on soon, anyway,” I said.
I reassembled the other handgun and loaded it. “We got money left?” Hawk said.
“About run out,” I said.
“Gonna need money,” Hawk said. “Airfare, cars, food, lodging, champagne.”
“I know a man who has some,” I said. “I’ll ask him.”
“Hugh Dixon,” Hawk said.
