last month in advance. With all those so-called incidental expenses they always stuck you with for the private room, that added up to more than six thousand dollars. Fleck had most of it. Plus he had ten thousand coming, and overdue. But that didn’t help him right now. He’d scared the Fat Man enough to hold him a day or two. But he couldn’t count on much more than that. The son of a bitch was the kind who just might call the cops in on him. That wasn’t something Fleck wanted to deal with. Not with Mama involved. He had to get the ten thousand.
There was another problem. He had to give some thought to that cowboy who’d walked over to his car last night and tapped at the window. What the hell did that mean? The guy looked like an Indian, and he was with that Indian woman who’d been visiting Highhawk. But what did it mean to Fleck? Fleck smelled cop. He sensed danger. There was more going down here than he knew about. That worried him. He needed to know more, and he intended to.
Fleck pulled into the Dunkin’ Donuts parking area. He was a little early but he noticed that the Ford sedan with the telephone company symbol was already parked. His man was on a stool, the only customer in the place, eating something with a fork. Fleck took the stool next to him.
“You got it?” Fleck asked.
“Sure. You got fifty?”
Fleck handed the man two twenties and a ten and received a folded sheet of paper. He felt foolish as he did it. If he was smart, he could probably have found a way to get this information free without paying this creep in the telephone company. Maybe it was even in the library. He unfolded the paper. It was a section torn from a Washington Convention and Visitors Bureau map of the District of Columbia.
“I circled the area where they use the 266 prefix,” the man said. “And the little
Only a few
“It’s mostly a residential district,” the man explained, “and part of the embassy row. Not much business for pay phones out there. You want a doughnut?”
“No time,” Fleck said, getting up.
“Haven’t heard much from you lately,” the man said. “You going out of business?”
“I’m in a little different line of work right now,” Fleck said, walking toward the door. He stopped. “Would you happen to know of any good nursing homes? Where they take good care of old people?”
“Don’t know nothing about ’em,” the man said.
Fleck hurried, even though he had until two P.M. He started on Sixteenth Street, because that’s where the countries without enough money to build on Massachusetts Avenue mostly located their embassies. None of the numbers matched there, although he found two booths with 266 numbers The Client had used earlier. He moved to Seventeenth Street and then Eighteenth. It was there he found the number he was scheduled to call at two P.M. Fleck backed out of the booth and looked up and down the street. No other pay booths in sight. He’d have to rent the car equipped with a mobile telephone. He’d reserved one at Hertz last night, just in case it worked out this way.
Fleck spent the next two hours driving out to Silver Spring and checking on a rest home he’d heard about out there. It was a little cheaper but the linoleum on the floors was cracked and streaked with grime and the windows hadn’t been washed and the woman who ran the place had a mean-looking mouth. He picked up the rent-a-car a little after one, a black Lincoln town car which was too big and too showy for Fleck’s taste but which would look natural enough in Washington. He made sure the telephone worked, put his Polaroid camera on the front seat beside him, and drove back to Eighteenth Street. He parked across the street and a little down the block from the phone booth, called it, left his receiver open, and walked down the sidewalk far enough to hear the ringing in the booth. Then he sat behind the wheel, slumped down to be less visible. He waited. While he waited, he thought.
First he went over his plan for this telephone call. Then he thought about the cowboy walking across the street and rapping at his window. If he was an Indian—and he looked like one—it might tie back to the killing. He’d left the train at the little town in New Mexico. Gallup, it was. Indians everywhere you looked. Probably they even had Indian cops and maybe one of them was looking into it. If that was true it meant they had tracked him back to Washington and somehow or other tied something together with that silly-looking bastard who wore his hair in a bun. That meant they must know a hell of a lot more about what Fleck was involved with than Fleck knew himself.
That thought made him uneasy. He shifted in the seat and looked out the window at the weather, getting his mind off what would happen to him if the police ever had him in custody, with his fingerprints matched and making the circuit. If it ever got that far, he could kiss his ass good-bye. He could never, ever let that happen. What would Mama do if it did?
If he could only find someplace where her always getting even didn’t get Mama into trouble. She was too old for that now. She couldn’t get away with it like when she was healthy. Like that time when they were living down there near Tampa when Mama was young and the landlord got the sheriff on to them to make them move out. He remembered Mama down on her stomach behind the stove loosening up something or other on the gas pipe with Delmar standing there handing her the tools. “You can’t let the bastards get up on you,” she was saying. “You hear that, Delmar? If you don’t even it up, they grind you down even more. They spit on you ever’ living time if you don’t teach them you won’t let them do it.”
And they had almost spit on them that time, if Mama hadn’t been so smart. Some of the neighbors had seen Delmar down there that night just before the explosion and the big fire. And they told on him, and the police came there to the Salvation Army shelter where Mama was keeping them and they took Delmar off with them. And then he and Mama had gone down to the sheriffs office and he told them it was him, not Delmar, the neighbors had seen. And it had worked out just like Mama had said it would. They had to go easy on him because he was only thirteen and it was a first offense on top of that, and they’d have to handle him in juvenile court. But with Delmar being older, and with shoplifting and car theft and assault already on his books, they would try him as an adult. Fleck had only got sixty days in the D Home and a year’s probation out of that one. Mama had always been good at handling things.
But now she was just too old and her mind was gone.
Fleck’s reverie was ended by a woman hurrying around the corner toward him. She wore a raincoat, something shiny and waterproof over her head, and was carrying a plastic sack. She walked past Fleck’s Lincoln without a glance. While he watched her in the rearview mirror, another figure appeared at the corner ahead of him. A man in a dark blue raincoat and a dark gray hat. He carried an umbrella and as he hesitated at the curb, looking for traffic, he opened it.
It had started to rain, streaking the car windows, pattering against the windshield. Fleck glanced at his watch.
