cruiser, this morning, to this island on Lake Superior. I guess some business associates of their boss, Ridge, lived on this island and, well, a storm blew in out of nowhere and… a wind like that can dump a vessel a lot larger, they said…”
“Oh, my God. What will I tell the girls? What will I tell the girls?”
“The boat was found, capsized. Nobody aboard.”
“What about Ridge?” I asked.
“He never was aboard,” Best said. “They were going to that island to meet him.” To her, he said: “There’s… I’m sorry, honey, but they said there’s really not much chance of recovering the bodies.”
She was weeping now, into my arm. “Jack… Jack… what can I do?”
I patted her back.
Best, looking stunned himself, shook his head, touched her shoulder; said, “Sorry, hon. I’m very sorry.”
“Why’d they call you?” I asked him.
“Authorities been trying to reach Angela all day,” he said, refusing to get defensive about it. “Somebody finally led ’em to the car lot. When they called, it was just after you left, and I was the only one still around.”
I looked at him hard, looking for complicity in his reddish round face; but I couldn’t find any. He seemed genuinely concerned, upset, himself.
“You want me to hang around?” he asked her.
She shook her head no.
He swallowed again, nodded, said he was very sorry, to let him know if there was anything he could do, and, head lowered, ear scabbed over some from where I tagged him, he shuffled down the curving walk to his shiny new car and drove away.
I guided her into the house and we sat on a sofa.
I let her cry into my shoulder for a while. She was having a rough time of it. So was her ex-husband, poor old Bob Jordan: first I shoot him and burn his body, and now he up and drowns.
Perhaps fifteen minutes later, she stood. “The girls will be home before long.”
I stood.
She hugged me.
“Oh, Jack. You’ve been so kind.” She swallowed. Looked up at me with those dark blue eyes, shining with tears. “Part of me still loved the bastard, I guess. It’s hard… so hard. But then you know all about that.”
I touched the tears on her cheek.
“You know all about losing somebody you love,” she said.
I said nothing.
“I think I’d like to be alone now,” she said. “Try to collect my thoughts before the girls get here.”
I thought that was a good idea. I called a taxi and sat with her till it arrived.
16
There were half a dozen flights from Chicago to monitor. It was Monday evening, and George Ridge, routed through O’Hare on one of three shuttle airlines, would be on one of them. I could not go down to the gate where he’d be coming in. Doing that would mean crossing the concourse, through security, and the nine-millimeter under my arm-in the shoulder holster, the noise suppressor in my suitcoat pocket to attach if need be-would win me the grand prize if I tried to walk through the metal detector.
I didn’t want to kill him here, anyway. I wanted to talk to him before I sent him on his way. He knew things that I wanted to know.
In the small gift shop I bought a Snickers bar (supper) and a late edition of the Quad City Times. I wasn’t in the mood to read it or anything, but I needed something to hide behind, and I’m just not the sunglasses and fake mustache type. George Ridge and I had, after all, met-back on the deck of my A-frame, when he first approached me to kill Preston Freed. Not only could he easily recognize me, he might even be on the lookout for me; he obviously knew I wasn’t dead: the cover-up he’d arranged for the deaths of Bob Jordan and Jim Crawford indicated he knew just how badly his attempt to kill me had gone awry.
Both Jordan and Crawford had their pictures on the front page of the very Times I held in my hands. I’d seen the pictures in the morning edition, so it came as no surprise to me (nor had it this morning) that Crawford, who had accompanied George Ridge and Angela’s ex-husband on that ill-fated expedition up north, was a certain thin, blond, cadaverous guy. It did come as a surprise to me to learn he’d died in a boating accident. I seemed to remember putting an axe in the back of his fucking head.
I planted myself in a seat in the wide, open area near baggage claim; the airport had a single conveyor belt affair that handled baggage from all flights. Ridge would just about have to come here. And even if he sent some flunky after his luggage, from where I was sitting I could see where the concourse emptied out all returning passengers. He wouldn’t escape me.
My intention, unless he made me, was to follow him. I could have waited at his fancy house-I knew where it was, I’d cased the outside of the place earlier today-but I thought there was a possibility he might make a stop somewhere on his way home to confer with some fellow conspirator. After all, me and the shit had hit the fan while he was (conveniently) out of the country, and tomorrow morning was the press conference-cum-shooting gallery. So tonight, it stood to reason, would be a lively night for George Ridge. Lively for a while, anyway.
In the parking lot I had found the chocolate-brown BMW he had driven to my place; mud no longer coated the license plate, which was Scott County. I touched the car, my hand trembling. I wanted this fucker. I wanted this fucker.
Ridge was large in my thoughts, but he wasn’t alone.
He shared them with the man he’d hired to do the job I turned down.
I had, in fact, spent the day trying to track that man-Stone-without much luck. I felt he had to be in town-I almost sensed he was here, if I believed in that shit-but he had apparently not checked into the Blackhawk. I was dealing with desk clerks on all three shifts and none of them seemed to have seen him.
Having worked with him, I knew he liked to roost close to the site of a hit. It was something we argued about, one of the reasons, really, why I had asked the Broker for somebody else to work with. I’d learned a lot from Stone, he was a good teacher, but he had a serious flaw: I felt he left a trail. He would go so far as to stay in the same hotel as his target and that, I knew, was stupid.
But either he had gotten smart in the intervening years, or he just hadn’t checked in yet. I laid twenties on desk clerks in three other, nearby downtown Davenport hotels, but my description of Stone, and his aliases, rang no bells there, either.
Stone had two other quirks. First, he liked arcade games, was your classic pinball wizard, and he particularly, predictably, enjoyed shooting games. Surveillance over a period of days, even weeks, is tiring, intense work, and I could understand him taking a breather with the mindless challenges presented by an arcade full of games. But he was excessive. In a bar, Stone could park himself at pinball or an electronic ping-pong game for hours.
When I was teamed with Stone, it was before the video-game craze came (and, largely, went). But I had a hunch Stone would have flipped out over Pac Man and Donkey Kong and Galaga and the like. So I spent the afternoon doing what I thought was a clever piece of detective work, checking out several video arcades in Davenport, thinking Stone might be killing time within. But he hadn’t been. So much for my investigative abilities.
Stone’s other quirk? He liked to swim. He would invariably stay at a hotel or motel with a pool, an indoor one this time of year; the relaxation, the soothing, meditative qualities of it were something Stone craved. I had, in fact, picked up the same habit. It wasn’t the only thing Stone had taught me, but in a way it was the most important. Swimming was a constant in my life: in Lake Paradise in the summer months, at the Y in Lake Geneva other months. And like Stone, I would tend to seek out an indoor pool wherever I was staying on a job.
I had swum last night, and today, at the Blackhawk’s pool, relaxing and staking the place out at the same time, my nine-millimeter wrapped in a towel, poolside.
No Stone.
I had also spent some of my time hanging around the non-video arcade below the lobby of the Blackhawk; a
