They followed him out of the concourse to where a white Lincoln limo waited. The man held the door while they entered the back and sank into smooth, soft leather, and then he got behind the wheel and drove off.
'It'll be about an hour, folks,' the driver said. 'There's drinks and things in the little refrigerator there, if you want.'
They each took a cold Coke. 'Guy really knows how to run an assassination,' Karp whispered. 'We're going out in style.'
Marlene shushed him and looked out the smoked window. As they drove north on the Tollway, suburbs changed gradually into country: wire fences, rolling hills, white-faced cattle grazing in small herds. They left the freeway and proceeded down a succession of increasingly smaller roads until they came to a barred gate with a gatehouse nearby. The man inside it came out and swung the gate aside. He was dressed in the same costume as their driver, with the additional touch of a white Stetson. On the arch over the gate, Queen Ranch was picked out in carved wooden rustic lettering; between the two words was a large plaque with the chess queen emblem.
They drove down a graveled road, across a little stream on a wooden bridge, and there, on a slight rise in the terrain, was the house.
A bribe of four hundred dollars had gained Caballo admittance to the apartment formerly occupied by the couple Marlene called Thug 'n' Dwarf. The Federal Gardens manager was happy to do it, since in its currently wrecked state the apartment was unrentable, and he hadn't gotten around to arranging the repairs. The story the thin man gave him, of having to hide out from his wife during a messy divorce, made sense to him: he'd had several himself. Cash under the table that he could conceal from his current spouse was always welcome.
Caballo waited for three days, eating cold food and sleeping a lot in the day, on the broken bed, when the man was away at work, with the stuff in his red envelope, and the woman and the child were in and out. He thought he would have to wait for the weekend. They would go out for a family excursion, and the stuff would be left behind and he could pop in and get it. He was fairly confident that he could find anything hidden in the small apartment. If not, he was perfectly prepared to burn the place down.
He listened a good deal at the party wall too, but he could hear little except the sound of the radio or the TV. He hated not knowing what was going on. This should've been a job for half a dozen men, with complete electronics, bugs in every room and on the car. Instead it was just him, more of Bishop's paranoia. During his frequent light sleeps he had fitful dreams of green jungles and red earth, clumps of frightened people, explosions and screams. Pleasant dreams, in which he was in control of the situation. He woke and washed himself, giving himself a whore's bath at the sink, using only a trickle of water to avoid making a sound. There was an old towel on the floor, smelly, but he used it anyway to dry his face and his body. He had known worse dwellings.
On the third day another man came to the apartment and the radio came on loud and stayed on until late. During the night, Caballo found a gallon jar under the sink. There was a hose attached to a spigot outside. He cut a few feet off this and slipped out to his rental car and siphoned gas, filling the jar.
The next morning Karp and his wife left, leaving the other man alone with the child. The radio stayed off, but the man and the child did not leave. Evening came; Caballo stayed alert. He had decided that if the man and the child did not leave, he would burn the place that night.
Around seven, Caballo heard their door slam, the voice of the child and the man's deeper voice telling her not to run in the parking lot, then the sound of a car starting and pulling out.
Caballo waited two minutes. He took a miniature flashlight and a big folding knife and went out the back door. He was actually glad he did not have to burn the place. Sometimes they kept stuff in the refrigerator, where it might survive even a big fire. He intended to be on the last flight to Mexico City once the material was destroyed.
In through the kitchen door; the lock was a joke. He started his search from the top, as he had been taught long ago. Large bedroom, the adults' obviously. Drawers out, scattered, bureaus turned over, closets emptied, pottery lamp smashed. Nothing. Slash mattresses and pillows. Kick baseboards and walls. Nothing.
Bathroom. Nothing in the medicine cabinet, ripped from the wall, or the hamper. Nothing in the toilet tank or under the sink.
Down the hall. The kid's bedroom. Fling apart the bureau. Overturn the toy chest. Rip the mattress and the pillows again. Slash apart the stuffed animals, break the heads of the dolls. Pull down the bookcase. He made the colorful books fly, tearing the bindings, scattering the pages.
He was working fast and efficiently. No more than five minutes had elapsed since he entered the apartment. A thin sweat lay on his brow, but his hard breathing was more from excitement than exertion.
He folded his knife and put it away and flung open the door to the closet, shining in the thin beam of his flash.
The smell, the hateful smell, the scent of screaming and beating and choking and shaking. Another person, another's scent was under it somehow, that and the reek of gasoline, soap, and anger, but there it was, definite, horrible, coming from the figure standing in the closet doorway.
Caballo saw the eyes in the thin beam, glowing disks. Another toy, was his first thought, a teddy bear. Then the eyes moved and he heard the snarling growl. He backed away a step and something enormous and black was on him like a piece of the darkness come alive. He was on his back beating at it with the puny flashlight, struggling to get his knife out of his pants pocket. There was something wrong with his right hand; he couldn't move it. Then the pain hit him and he screamed.
The taste of blood, forbidden, exciting. The great head heaved, teeth met, the sharp carnassial teeth at the side of the jaw, cutting through flesh and tendon and bone. The screams stopped. The bad scent was gone. Sweetie played with what he had taken for a few minutes, chewing until most of the juice and all the bad scent was gone, and then went back into the closet and slept.
TWENTY
Harley Blaine's house was not the house in the Depuy film. That had been a traditional ranch house with a patio. Karp and Marlene now entered a much larger, more contemporary structure, a place of sheer white walls cut with the narrow clefts of windows.
'The architect was obviously inspired by The Guns of Navarone,' Marlene whispered as their driver ushered them into an entrance hall tiled in glazed blue Mexican ceramic. 'Notice how the house is on a little rise with the trees and shrubs cut back for a couple hundred yards? And the slit windows. The joint is a fortress.'
'Yeah, you expect to see Richard Widmark coming down a rope in a watch cap,' Karp agreed. 'Speaking of movies, what happened to the lion and the scarecrow? And why are we whispering?'
Marlene suppressed a giggle. 'I think we're trying to not scream. I wonder where the dungeons are?'
They were led through several doors and found themselves again in sunlight. The house was built around a vast atrium, glass-covered and heavily planted along its borders. Its center was occupied by a large swimming pool. By this stood a hospital-style bed. On the bed lay Harley Blaine.
'Have a seat,' said Blaine when they approached the bed. 'Welcome to Texas. And the Queen Ranch.' They sat in the two elegant sling chairs that had been placed next to a low table by the bedside. 'There are refreshments on that little bar by the pool, and I have arranged a luncheon for you all. I regret that I take my own nourishment nowadays through a tube.'
He smiled, a ghastly sight. Blaine was wasted in the manner of victims of end-stage cancer, shocking to Marlene, whose image of him was based on films taken from his early youth onward to maturity. Once a good-sized man with a full head of hair, he had become a living skeleton, his head a death camp inmate's skull bearing a few wisps of dull fuzz. His eyes, however, sunken as they were, still blazed with energy, and with, Marlene thought, an unnatural, puckish glee that seemed almost obscene in so devastated a frame.
She looked at her husband, who appeared distinctly uncomfortable, his skin pale and damp-looking, his jaw tight and twitching, his hands clenching and uncoiling. It occurred to her that the last time he saw someone in this state it had been his mother lying there, and he had been fourteen.
Karp was thinking of his mother, but his discomfort arose from rage. He was considering why the eyes of this criminal, who had done so much evil, should shine so with intelligence and life, while those of his mother, who had been sweet and mild her whole life, had, at the same state in her disease, held nothing but pain and idiotic terror.
