“All right.”
The guy sat, looking disturbed, confused about something, and Carlow arranged the wheelchair and himself so the guy was hard to see from either direction along the promenade. “Tell us about it,” he suggested.
“Well, the thing is,” the guy said, “I’m here sort of secretly, and I’m not sure if I should blow my cover.”
Carlow said, “You mean, you’re not an ordinary passenger, you’re not what you seem to be, you’re something else.” A cop? Not a chance.
“That’s right. My name’s Greg Manchester, and I’m a reporter, and I’m doing a”
Noelle snapped, with more sharpness than her frail condition would allow, “A reporter?”
Manchester was too involved in his own problems to notice Noelle’s slip. He said, “The cruise line company won’t permit unescorted reporters, so I just want to do a fly on the wall kind of thing. Not negative, just fun.”
Carlow said, “So you’re going around looking at things, making notes
“
“And taking pictures, too,” Manchester said. “When nobody’s looking.” To Noelle he said, “That’s why I was coming to you anyway, to get your name.”
Noelle said, “You have pictures of me?Oh, I wouldn’t like that, the way I look”
“You’re beautiful,Miss Jane Ann, is it?”
Carlow said, “But then something else happened. What?”
“There’s a VIP on the ship, I don’t know if you”
“Yeah, we’ve seen him,” Carlow said, thinking, this is it. This is it right here. “What about him?”
“Well, he sayshe’s a state assemblyman named Kotkind,” Manchester said, “but he isn’t. He’s a fake. I knowAssemblyman Kotkind, I’ve interviewed him.”
“Ah,” Carlow said.
“What I can’t figure out,” Manchester said, “is why anybody would dothat. Did the real assemblyman send this guy in his place? He is handing out the assemblyman’s business card. If I say something, mycover is blown and maybe I just make a fool of myself. Or maybe something’s wrong, and the cruise line should know about it. What do you think?”
Noelle said, “I think” and began to cough. She tried to go on talking through the coughs that wracked her poor frail body, and Manchester leaned closer to her, concerned, trying to make out what she was trying to say.
Carlow kept his wallet in his inside jacket pocket because he kept his sap in his right hip pocket; a black leather bag full of sand. It was one smooth movement to reach back, draw it out, lift it up, drop it down, and put Mr. Manchester on ice.
Noelle’s left arm shot out, her hand splayed against Manchester’s chest, and she held him upright on the bench. “Don’t kill him,” she said.
“Of course not,” Carlow told her. He knew as well as she did that the law goes after a killer a lot more determinedly than it goes after a heister. If it were possible to keep this clown alive, Carlow would do it. He said, “I need a gag, and I need something to tie him.”
“You hold him for a minute.”
Carlow pushed the wheelchair a few inches forward, and sat on the bench beside the clown. He put his left elbow up onto the guy’s chest and said, “Okay.”
Noelle was wearing all these filmy garments out of a gothic novel, so now she reached down inside and gritted her teeth and Carlow heard a series of rips. Out she came with several lengths of white cloth, and handed them to him. “I’ve got him now,” she said, and put her hand on Manchester’s chest again.
Carlow bent to tie the ankles together, then tied the wrists behind the back, then stuffed a ball of cloth into Manchester’s mouth and used the last strip to make a gag.
Noelle said, “What are you going to do with him?”
“Lifeboat.”
They’d watched that damn safety drill every night for over a week, so Carlow knew exactly how to open the sliding glass door and how to open one segment of the top of the enclosed lifeboat just below. “You keep him,” he said, and started to rise.
“Wait!”
“For what?”
“Damn it, Mike,” she said. “Get the camera. That’s myface he’s got there, and probably yours, too.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
Carlow sat again, and patted him down, and found first the cassette recorder and then the Minolta. “Nice camera,” he commented, and pocketed both.
He looked around. The half-asleep couple were still in the same spot. Toward the stern, three or four people were looking out and downriver at where they’d been, talking together. Carlow stood, crossed to the outer glass wall, slid open a panel, stepped through onto the curved roof of the lifeboat, leaned down, gave the stiff handle a quarter turn, lifted, and a rectangular piece of the roof opened right up. Then he crossed back to Noelle, sat beside Manchester again, and said, “Now I have to get him over there.”
“Put him on my lap,” she said, “and wheel us over.”
“Nice.”
