The Ghostway

that it was one of the few remaining signs left in America of social position versus family poverty. Rich people could afford orthodontists.

'I don't get involved with what happens after you find her. Just make sure she doesn't make any trouble.' He lit the cigaret with a silver lighter extracted from the end of the onyx box. 'Absolutely sure. I do not want her talking to anybody.'

He exhaled a cloud of smoke.

'And I want that picture. I want it brought to me, personally. I want an end to it.'

Vaggan said nothing. A map of Scotland printed on something that looked like parchment dominated the wall behind McNair. Its borders were decorated by patches of plaid which Vaggan presumed were the tartans of the Scottish clans. A bagpipe and a heavy belt holding a scabbarded sword hung beside it. A claymore, Vaggan thought. Wasn't that the Scottish name for it? Down the wall were photographs. People in kilts. People in fox-hunting coats. A photograph of Queen Elizabeth II, an autograph scrawled across the bottom.

'Here's her description,' McNair said. He held out a sheet of typing paper.

'I hope you have a little more than that,' Vaggan said. 'If you want her found this year.'

'I have an address.'

'Addresses help,' Vaggan said.

'If she's still there,' McNair said. 'It was yesterday morning when I called you.'

'Maybe we'll be lucky,' Vaggan said. 'Anyway, it's a place to pick up the trail.'

McNair was holding the typing paper, folded, between his fingers, tapping the edge of the fold against the desk, looking at Vaggan.

'How'll you do it?'

'What? Find her?'

'Kill her.'

Henry had replaced the water with another crystal glass and disappeared. No ice cubes. Vaggan sipped, looking over the rim of the glass at McNair. He was thinking of tape recordings, but he could think of nothing McNair could gain by taping this conversation. Still, it was an odd question. Vaggan answered with a shrug and put down the glass. McNair interested him more and more. But the job was suddenly less appealing. Such things should be strictly business. No pleasure mixed in.

'I would have thought you'd have a favorite method,' McNair said. His expression was bland, but the greenish eyes in their deep sockets were avid.

It should be purely business, Vaggan thought. Otherwise things get too complicated. Hard to calculate, which made them needlessly risky.

Did he need this job? Did he still want to work for McNair?

'If I did your work, I'd have a favorite method,' McNair repeated.

Vaggan shrugged again, took another sip of the tepid tap water. Outside, the McNair lawn sloped away toward the Pacific. The glass was like green velvet.

'I can't see how you're going to get off,' Vaggan said. 'From what the story in the L.A. Times had to say, you're indicted on eleven counts, witnesses tying you into the business personally, everything neat and tidy the way it sounded. Why don't you jump bail, cash in a little of this'—he gestured around him at the room—'and make a run for it?' He sipped again. 'Actually, there wouldn't have to be any actual running. Just transfer some cash to wherever and get some papers and fly away. Easy. No worry. No risk.'

Vaggan had been studying McNair's face. It registered irritation, then distaste. About what Vaggan had expected.

'I'm not guilty,' McNair said.

'Not until the jury convicts you,' Vaggan said. 'Then you are, and the judge raises the bail way up there, and it's all going to be a lot tougher and more expensive.'

'I have never been convicted of anything.' McNair said. 'No McNair has ever been in prison. Never will be.' He got up and stood by the window, his hand resting on a form Vaggan presumed was a sculpture cast in steel. 'Besides, if you walk away from it, you can't take this along.'

He seemed to mean the sculpture and what he saw from the window. Or perhaps it meant the bagpipe and being a McNair. Vaggan could appreciate this. One of the rulers. The hard men. An interesting man, Vaggan thought. He'd be dealing with the McNairs after the missiles, the tough ones. He understood the old man better again. The avidity he'd seen was as much like greed as it was cruelty. Cruelty bothered him because it seemed beside the point, a waste of emotions that seemed strange to him. But Vaggan could understand greed perfectly.

'I have a feeling you're balking,' McNair said, still looking out the window. 'Why else all this impertinence? All these questions? Will you take care of it for me?'

'All right,' Vaggan said. He got up and took the paper from the old man's fingers, unfolded it, and read. The address was on a street he'd never heard of. He'd get it located on his map, and wait for dark, and get it over with.

Chapter 16

Jim chee, who had always considered himself an excellent driver, drove now uneasily. The mixture of precise timing, skill, and confidence in their immortality that Los Angeles drivers brought to their freeway system moved Chee back and forth from anxious admiration to stoic resignation. But his luck had held so far, it should hold for another afternoon. He rolled his pickup truck through the endless sprawl of the city and the satellite towns that make Los Angeles County a wilderness of people. For a while he managed to keep track of just where he was in relation to where he had been, noticing direction shifts and remembering when he switched from one freeway to another. But soon it overwhelmed him. He concentrated solely on the freeway map, which Shaw had marked for