'Yeah.'
'Did you have to do that?'
'I had to find you,' I said. 'I couldn't stay around and protect those two whores from the trouble we got them into. When we left, the pimp would have killed them.'
'So you had to kill him.'
'Yes.'
'To protect the whores from a jeopardy that you caused them.'
'I was looking for you.'
'So in a sense you did it for me?'
'I guess I thought so,' I said.
'You don't lie to yourself,' Susan said. 'In your world, it had to be done.'
I didn't say anything.
'Hawk has to do this,' Susan said.
'He does.'
'He and you,' she said, 'for your whole adulthoods, have been a certainty in each other's lives.'
Susan ate the rest of her apple fritter, except for the piece she gave Pearl. She drank some coffee and put the cup down.
'In his life,' she said, 'you may be the only certainty.' 'May be,' I said.
Susan's big, dark eyes seemed intensely alive to me. Pearl rested her long chin on the table, and Susan patted her absently, smoothing Pearl's ears.
'You have to help him,' she said.
'I guess I do,' I said.
43
HAWK AND I were in Marshport, in a badly stocked bodega a half block up from the mouth of a weed-thick alley that ran between two paintless tenements. The alley opened at its far end directly across the street from Rimbaud's office.
'What story was the Gray Man going to tell?' I said.
'Don't know. I just told him get a Ukrainian down here at three, and let no one know he'd done it.'
An uninteresting-looking gray Chevy pulled around the corner and parked by the alley.
'Well, he thought of something,' I said.
Hawk nodded, looking at the car. A big man got out.
'Guy with Boots,' I said, 'at Revere Beach.'
'Fadeyushka Badyrka,' Hawk said.
'Anybody else in the car?' I said.
'We'll find out,' Hawk said. 'I'll watch Fadeyushka.'
We went out of the bodega and walked across the street. The Ukrainian watched us come. No one moved in the car.
When we were maybe five feet away, Fadeyushka said, 'What?'
Hawk shot him in the forehead with a nine-millimeter Colt. The Colt had a silencer on it and made only a modest noise. Fadeyushka went down without a sound. So easy. I stepped to the car with my gun out. No one was in it. Hawk unscrewed the silencer and slipped it into his pocket. Then he stowed the Colt and picked up Fadeyushka and moved him without any apparent effort into the alley, down between the houses, and deposited the body behind some trash cans right across from Rimbaud's big plate-glass window. I knelt down and felt over his cooling body and found Fadeyushka's gun stuck in his right hip pocket. It was some sort of European semiautomatic nine-millimeter pistol. There was a round in the chamber already. Hawk studied the dead man for a time.
'I come in the alley,' Hawk said. 'He's there shooting in the window. I shoot, get him in the head. He fall back there behind the trash. Gun falls out of his right hand,' Hawk nodded, 'lands there.'
'That's where it'll be,' I said.
'Okay,' Hawk said. 'I'll go in. I stand right in front of the front window, where you can see me. And I stay there until things are right. When I move out of sight, you shoot.'
I nodded.
'The window is dead glass walking,' I said.
'Then you head up the alley lipity-fucking-lop,' he said, 'scoot 'round the block and come running up saying, 'What happened?' '
'You already told me this once,' I said.
'Never lose money,' Hawk said, 'underestimating your intelligence.'
