“Good question,” Al told me. “I’d say their track record. It was rumored that they used to hold out on the organization. They weren’t as big then and it wasn’t all that uncommon a deal at certain levels and for the sake of keeping peace in the outlying areas the organization let it pass. Now it doesn’t smell so good. The in boys think the whole thing could be a fast play to gain leverage or to buck the syndicate. It’s been done before in the days of the beer barons. They don’t want it to happen again. Narcotics comes in a small package with millions in profits, easy to ship, easy to dispose of, and with enough laid by, a smart operator could buy his own organization.”
“Brothers Guido couldn’t be that stupid,” I said.
“Maybe not. Right now they’re trying to prove it. I wouldn’t want to get caught in the crossfire.”
“Not you, Al.”
He grinned at me and stopped swabbing the tabletop with his beer can. “Dog ... I don’t give a damn, but my curiosity is killing me.”
“What?”
“Guys can get themselves in trouble all kinds of ways. Sometimes it’s not just the direct action ... it’s more like the links that tie one thing to another.”
“You’re not making sense, kid.”
“Somebody’s tagging you on this narcotics deal.”
I shrugged, not answering him.
“All my phone calls got me some other information too.”
I waited.
“You got wrapped up in black marketeering right after the war, didn’t you?”
“Asking or extrapolating again?”
“That was something you could handle. You still had all that war craziness inside you. You liked the action as long as it spiced up the day and Europe was just the place to find it. You were big and tough and could handle trouble with even bigger trouble and enjoy every minute of it. Killing was nothing new to you and by that time it was simply a natural function of things.”
“That’s what you think?” I asked him.
“That’s what I’m going to find out in a minute,” Al told me.
“I hope you enjoy the answers.”
His eyes had that quizzical expression in them again, deep and heavy, partially closed. “Were you in the black market?”
“Yes.”
“That whole operation was tied in with narcotic traffic, wasn’t it?”
I nodded.
“You ever kill anybody since the war?
“Quite a few,” I said.
When he finished studying my face he said, “I’m sorry I asked.”
I got up and put on my coat and hat, picked the last butt out of the pack and lit it.
“What are you planning to do, Dog?”
“Take a little trip to my old hometown. Just simple business like the way I hoped everything would be.”
“Watch it. You’re leaving pretty deep tracks.”
I walked to the door and opened it. Al was sitting there watching me and tossed me a sad salute. I said, “There’s a question you didn’t ask, buddy. You would have liked that answer.”
I changed rental cars twice before I reached Linton, threading my way over a prearranged route I had picked out on the map, driving at night so it would be easier to spot a tail and easier to lose if I had one. Before the first switch I thought somebody had picked me up, but I got off the main road and the other car went by, its headlights out of focus and didn’t show again.
Now the early glow of dawn was winking off the buildings up ahead and I pulled into a diner just outside of town, found a booth in the back and ordered breakfast. Traffic hadn’t gotten started yet and outside of a lone trucker at the counter I had the place to myself.
Back in the city, Hobis and The Chopper were staked out where I wanted them, two others ready to stay in close on Lee and Sharon, all the little wheels were put in motion and I was wound up so tight I could hardly eat.
I was back in the game again. Hell, I didn’t want it that way. They could have laid off me and the whole stinking mess would have stayed in the usual state of ferment. Now it was getting ready to explode. And that was the trouble with an explosion ... it took everything with it, the good, the bad and the neutral. All that was left was ruins until somebody else built on the rubble and let that ferment into an explosion too. For twenty years the crashing thunder of the blast had been all around me and I was tired of it, the kind of tired that makes your bones ache and your mind want to get off into a lonely space and just sit and sit and sit forever.
Home. There never was any such place. It was just something you thought you had and something you thought you wanted, but when you went to find it, it wasn’t there at all. I was playing kid games with myself, using a penny ante inheritance for a ticket to find home again.
My ticket had been punched a long time ago.
Home wasn’t any place on the line.
I reached for a cigarette and pulled Lee’s note out with the pack. He had left it on my dresser and I had stuck it in my pocket without reading it. I unfolded it and laid it on the table.
Across the top Lee’s scrawl read, “Doorman gave me this.” The rest of the note was only two words and a number printed carefully in pencil with an odd flourish to the letters.
Yet somebody knew where I was. Somebody delivered it and somebody expected me to understand the cryptic message. Had it been from any of the old bunch it would have been coded so that I could decipher it. Of all the shiny new faces I had met since I got off the plane, I couldn’t pick one who’d bother corresponding this way. And it wouldn’t be the hunters. They didn’t write notes. They just tracked you down and killed, picking their own time and place.
When the details of each letter and numeral were clear in my mind I touched a match to the note and let it burn in the ashtray on the table. The counterman looked over at me curiously, then shrugged and turned away. The trucker finished his coffee, paid his bill and left. Outside, the sun had pushed up over the horizon and Linton had started to come alive. I picked up my check, handed the guy at the register a five, took my change and left.
At the comer of Bergan and High, cars flanked both sides of the street outside Tod’s and men in working clothes were drifting inside in groups of twos and threes. I parked at the end of the line, cut across the street and went in with a couple of men in their fifties who looked at me curiously.
One said, “You with the union?”
“Nope. Just a visitor. Used to live here.”
“Come back for a job?”
I grinned at him and shook my head. “I’m in a different business. I know Tod, that’s all. What’s going on?”
“Barrin’s taking on more men,” the one guy told me. He gave me a wink over his glasses. “They won’t have much to work with. They could use some young blood like you.”
“You flatter me, friend, I’m one of the oldies too.”
“Not like us, son, not like us.”
Tod had given up in exasperation and put three girls behind the bar. A couple more were hustling coffee in the next room where all the noise was coming from and Tod was sitting it out at a back table with a schooner of beer in front of him and his ear glued to a portable radio. When he saw me his eyebrows went up and he pointed to
