“They got people on top,” Hawk said.
“Time to go,” I said and put the car in drive. “What I wonder,” I said as we headed back toward Boise, “is if Jerry Costigan knows we know where he is.” I looked back briefly over my shoulder at Susan.
“I don’t know,” Susan said. “I can’t figure out what he’s doing.” He always meant Russell. I didn’t question it. “He’s ambivalent about his father.”
“How so,” I said.
“He loves him and hates him, wants to be him, fears he isn’t man enough,” Susan said. “The other side of Oedipus.”
“You shrinks ever look for motive?” I said.
“Yes, but not always in the same place you do,” she said.
“What’s he get out of this? Out of telling me where his father is holed up?”
“Maybe he lying,” Hawk said.
“Right,” I said. “Maybe he is. Maybe it’s a way to steer us away from Jerry and out here in the great West where we’re easy to find and make a good target. But the only way we find that out is to test it, and we have to test it by assuming Jerry’s here.”
Hawk said, “Un huh.”
“So back to the question. What’s Russell get out of helping us?”
“The good feeling that comes from being a nice person,” Hawk said.
“Besides that,” I said.
Hawk looked back at Susan. I glanced back at her. She nodded at Hawk.
“If you get killed,” she said, “he has no competition for me.”
Hawk nodded.
“And if we kill Jerry?” I said.
“He has no competition for Grace,” Susan said.
Hawk and I were silent as we came into Boise. Susan didn’t add to her comment. In downtown Boise I pulled the car in and parked on the street outside the Idanha Hotel. I looked at Susan.
“Is there any chance,” I said, “that Russell might have been found on a hillside with his ankles pierced?”
Susan smiled painfully and shook her head. “I can’t joke about it, even a little,” she said. “I know you’re trying to make it easier.”
“Okay,” I said. “You’re saying that whether I get killed or Jerry gets killed, or we both get killed, Russell wins.”
The afternoon was beginning to darken. It was autumn in Boise. Actually it was autumn in most of the hemisphere, but I only noticed it in Boise. The sun still shone full on the upper stories of the low downtown buildings, but the streets were shadowed. There wasn’t much traffic. I had a sense that maybe there never was much traffic in Boise.
“This is the first time my ass may depend on whether Freud was right.”
“And Sophocles,” Susan said.
“Him too.”
CHAPTER 50
“IF THE MINE DEPENDS ON OUTSIDE FOR POWER or water we could cut it off and force them out,” Hawk said. We were eating dinner in the Idanha dining room.
“If we could find a way to do it,” I said. “But when they came out they’d have such security around Costigan that we’d be no better off.”
“And they’d know we here,” Hawk said.
Susan was quiet, eating some cutthroat trout amandine. Hawk had ordered a Sokol Blosser Pinot Noir and I sipped some. I made a pleased motion with my head.
“Oregon,” Hawk said. “Best Pinot Noir comes from Oregon.”
“Who knew?” I said. I poured a little into Susan’s glass. She smiled at me.
“Also,” she said, “the Costigans aren’t officially doing anything illegal. They can, and probably will, call the cops as needed. You would end up in trouble with the law again and you already have too much of that.”
“Also reasonable to assume that Costigan has some influence with the law wherever he is,” I said.
“Okay,” Hawk said, “so we don’t force him out. Mean we gotta go in.”
I nodded. “At least he won’t expect us in there,” I said.
“Hell,” Hawk said, “I don’t expect us in there.”
“We can’t force it,” I said.
“True,” Hawk said. “Eighty-second Airborne couldn’t force it.”
