“Exit 17 coming up,” Loomis said.
THEY HAD MOVEDthe girl into the smaller of the two bedrooms, where they’d fastened to the door a hasp and lock similar to the one on the closet door. There was a single window in that bedroom, but it opened onto the beach, and there was nobody on that beach but us seagulls, boss. Besides, the girl was handcuffed to the radiator and couldn’t get to the window even if she’d tried. Avery had warned her that there was no sense yelling for help because then they would have to kill her on the spot instead of delivering her to her benefactors at Bison this very night.
Avery had patiently explained to the girl everything they hoped to accomplish today, had laid it all out in detail, the way he had done so far with Barney Loomis and would continue to do throughout the day as events unfolded. This way, there’d be no surprises and no mistakes. After they picked up the cash, they’d deliver the girl tonight as promised, and waltz off with a bit more than $83,000 each, though Cal had already begun complaining that their share—Avery’s and Kellie’s, since they were a couple—would come to twice what he was getting for the same amount of work and risk.
Avery had explained to him, as patiently as he’d explained everything to the girl, that they’d have had to pay the same amount to whichever third party they’d engaged for the gig. So what difference did it make if Kellie was that person? Kellie knew how to handle a boat, and Avery had taught her how to use the assault rifle, more or less, though frankly she wasn’t too sure how she felt about maybe having to shoot the girl if she raised any kind of fuss while they were out there picking up the loot.
She was alone in the house with her now.
It was almost four-thirty. Kellie hadn’t heard a peep from the bedroom since the boys had left the house. She hoped the girl was okay, they were supposed to drop her off tonight in the same condition as when they’d snatched her. She went to the bedroom door, knocked on it, and yelled, “You okay, Tamar?” She felt sort of a thrill calling a rock star by her first name.
“I’m thirsty,” Tamar called from behind the locked door.
“Would you like some iced tea? There’s some iced tea in the fridge.”
“Please,” Tamar said.
“No funny stuff when I unlock the door, right?”
“What funny stuff did you have in mind?” Tamar asked.
Kellie smiled.
“I’ll bring you the tea,” she said to the door, and went down the hall and into the master bedroom. Cal had complained about this, too, the fact that the pair of them got to sleep in a big double bed in the big bedroom while he had to sleep on the living room couch. Cal complained about a lot of things. She’d be glad when this gig—listen to me, she thought, it must be contagious.
The three masks were on a shelf in the closet. Avery had ordered them from the Internet at forty-five bucks a pop, for all three of them to wear on the job itself, and in the house whenever they were around the girl. Actually, Kellie thought it was idiotic to be wearing a mask after the girl had already seen her face, something like locking the barn door after the horse had run off.
This still bothered her.
The fact that the girl had taken a good long look at her face—well, just a short glimpse, really. Even so, she’d undoubtedly seen the red hair and the green eyes, Kellie’s best features, actually, and maybe memorable, though she hated to sound conceited. Not to mention the freckles all over her Irish phiz, wouldn’t Tamar remember those? Wouldn’t she be able to describe her once they let her go free?
This really bothered her a lot.
Avery had chosen the Yasir Arafat mask for himself and the Saddam Hussein mask for Cal, probably because the two men were all over television these days—though not as often as Tamar Valparaiso. Kellie wished he’d ordered her at least a female mask, but certainly
Kellie took the rubber mask down from the shelf now, and pulled it over her head, covering her face and her short red hair. Maybe Tamar had forgotten what she looked like, after all. There’d been only that few seconds of exposure before she slammed the closet door shut again. Shrugging (but it still bothered her), Kellie went into the kitchen, took a bottle of Snapple from the shelf, unscrewed the lid, and poured most of the contents into a glass. She drank the rest of the tea herself, straight from the bottle. Then she picked up the glass she’d poured for Tamar, and lifted the AK-47 from where it was resting on the kitchen table.
With the glass of tea in one hand and the assault rifle in the other, she went down the hall again, and unlocked the door to the bedroom.
She sure hoped Tamar wouldn’t try anything funny.
THEY’D BEEN PARKEDin the drop-off area at the top of the ramp no longer than three minutes when the car phone rang again. This time, Loomis himself picked up.
“Hello,” he said.
“Mr. Loomis?”
“Yes?”
“Drive west on Hawkes,” Avery said. “Make a right turn on Norman and proceed to the intersection of Norman and a Hun’ Eighty-fifth. Park there. Repeat, please.”
“I’m driving to Norman and a Hundred Eighty-fifth,” Loomis said.
“More later,” Avery said, and hung up.
“The Wasteland,” Carella said.
THERE WERE SOMEsections of this city that were completely forsaken, lost to rehabilitation, utterly resigned to rot and decay. The area that ran for some ten blocks west-to-east from 181st to 191st and another ten blocks north-to-south from Norman to Jewel was one such desolate location.
Appropriately nicknamed “The Wasteland” long before its buildings were abandoned by landlords loath to spend another nickel keeping them in repair, the area was later renounced even by the squatters who had taken up residence in its empty dwellings. The city finally condemned everything within the square half-mile The Wasteland encompassed. Windows and doors were boarded over, once stately living quarters left to crumble into dust.
Today, even in the waning daylight hours, the area resembled nothing more than a war zone. Rats had chewed away the wooden barriers on windows and doors; they now scampered freely from building to building, foraging in the garbage residents from neighboring areas came here to dump whenever the Department of Sanitation neglected its scheduled pickups. Like eyeless sockets in forgotten faces, The Wasteland’s empty windows stared out at only rubble-strewn lots.
Occasionally a patrol car from the Nine-Six swept through these potholed streets.
Occasionally, a dead body was discovered here before the rats left nothing but clean, picked-over bones.
When Carella was a college student, he used to call girls he was trying to impress and read to them passages from T. S. Eliot’s collected poems. He read mostly from “Prufrock,” which impressed nineteen-year-old co-eds with how deeply romantic and sensitive and experienced he was, especially when he came to the line “And I have known the eyes already.”
But he also read from
