earth are you doing, Tommy?”
“Going crazy,” I snarled.
Do the French still have the Foreign Legion? What’s the upper age limit, anyway?
CHAPTER TWENTY
A shotgun is a bit of metal and a couple of pieces of wood, and not much else. The two Grafton left also had slings attached, so they could be carried by hanging them over a shoulder.
The eighteen-inch barrels had once been a bright, polished blue and were now pitted, scratched and, in the one I was holding on my lap, a bit rusty in three places. The receiver was shiny, with only traces of the original bluing. All in all, the Remington Model 870 Police shotgun in my lap looked like what it was, a utilitarian weapon that was lucky to get a wipe-down occasionally and an annual look from the agency armorer.
The raw winter day outside the window was overcast, breezy and promised rain. When I talked to Willie on our radio net early this morning, he was doing okay, he said. “Gettin a taste of how the other half lives,” he told me. “More people oughta give this a try.”
“My next vacation,” I said.
The radio earpiece was a tiny thing, about the size of an earplug. It fit completely inside the ear channel, so was invisible from any angle but directly abeam. Most people who saw it would assume it was a hearing aid. Mine fit fairly well, so after a while I forgot it was in there.
The three women spent the morning watching chick flicks in the den, and I spent it walking around the living room, sitting in a chair with my shotgun on my lap or lying on the couch with the darn thing on the floor beside me. The other shotgun — Robin’s — was on the dining room table. She pumped all the shells out onto the carpet, pulled the trigger, made sure the safety worked, then loaded it again and left it there. Out in the living room I could hear the three of them laughing occasionally above the sound track.
Ah, me.
I couldn’t get Marisa out of my mind. She appeared to be a victim of an evil man — and I could go either way on this — a daughter whom he loved, sort of, and wanted to use to help with the family crimes, or an innocent child that he had made a psychic prisoner with a lifetime of abuse so that he could use her someday, someway, for his own perverted ends.
On the other hand, she might be Qasim’s loyal lieutenant, following orders, playing a role for us suckers. What if everything she told me, and presumably Grafton, was a lie?
She could have killed her husband. That would have been relatively easy.
It would have been more difficult, but she could have done Alexander Surkov. At Qasim’s order, perhaps.
Why did she try to distract me in the Zetsche castle when I was whanging away at a fleeing villain? The villain turned out to be her mother-in-law’s chauffeur, but she didn’t know that. Or did she?
Why didn’t I ask her when I had the chance?
Was I worried about the answer I might get?
And that knife in Zetsche — conceivably she could have put it there. Probably not, but perhaps.
I walked around Grafton’s living room, peeked out the crack in the drapes occasionally and worried all these beads again and again.
When I got hungry I raided the fridge, made myself a sandwich and ate it at the dining room table. Washed it down with a bottle of water. Thought about Marisa as I ate.
If something didn’t happen, and soon, I was going to lose it big-time. My future would be a straitjacket and a padded room.
Jake Grafton went to Huntington Winchester’s private office and locked the door, then called his boss, William Wilkins, on his portable encrypted satellite telephone.
“Eighteen cell phone calls from that house in the last three days,”
Wilkins said with a sigh. “They’re worse than a pack of teenage girls. No incoming calls. Apparently they keep their phones off when they aren’t calling someone so that they can fool you. They do get a string of messages when they turn their phones on. All pretty innocuous, so far. If they have cell phones we don’t know about, they may have made and received a few more calls. Got a pencil?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Jerry Hay Smith made eight calls. He called four different women, if you can believe it — that ugly little runt. And he called his editor four times, told him he was being held prisoner by the CIA. Those were interesting conversations.”
“The editor going to run it?”
“Not today or tomorrow. Smith told him to sit on it, but the editor is curious as hell.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Cairnes talked to his wife once, his kids twice and his bank associates three times. Winchester called his company headquarters twice and his divorce lawyer once.”
Jake was making notes. He added the numbers. “That’s seventeen.”
“Yeah. Saving the best for last, ol’ Marisa called someone in Brooklyn, a male. Gave him your home address in Rosslyn and told him where you and she and Winchester and Isolde and all the rest are.”
“Uh-huh,” Jake said, making a little meaningless doodle on his notepad.
“The bitch sold you out, Jake.”
“Looks that way.”
“You knew she was going to do it, didn’t you?”
“Kinda had a hunch. Didn’t you?”
“We have the number and location of that cell phone she called, and a voiceprint of the man she talked to. The account is in the name of some guy who isn’t in our database, an Iranian immigrant, we believe.
“Don’t go after him,” Jake said. “Qasim probably isn’t there, and if he is, he’ll boogie before you can spring the trap.”
“The FBI is chomping at the bit. We’re flat running out of time. I’ve talked to Molina three times today, and he wants me to pull the rabbit out of the hat now. I’ll keep you advised.”
“Okay.”
Jake hung up and continued to make designs on the notepad in front of him. Finally he tired of it and tore the top five sheets of paper off the pad, wadded them up and burned them in the fireplace. Then he went downstairs.
The whole crowd was seated around the fireplace in the living room. Conversation stopped when he appeared at the head of the stairs, and three or four of them glanced at him as he came down.
Looks like they’re planning a mutiny, he thought. He headed for the kitchen to talk to the FBI agent who was doing the cooking.
“Tommy, we got a watcher.”
Willie Varner’s voice in my ear brought me wide awake. I had been dozing in a living room recliner. The women were in the kitchen going through cookbooks and hunting through the cupboard, so we were going to eat well during our incarceration. I looked at my watch. Five thirty in the evening.
“Tell me about him,” I said to Willie as I got out of my chair and laid the shotgun on the couch.
“He’s in an old Saturn, kinda dark blue or maybe black — hard to tell in this light. Been sittin’ there for a half hour or so. He’s alone in the car, parked across the street, just sittin’ there watchin’ the building and the street.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Can’t tell. I’m in a doorway about fifty yards behind him. Can’t see nothin’ but the back of his head. Don’t want to move. Don’t want him to pick up on me.”
“Just sit,” I told him. “Watch for other people. There’ll be somebody else along after a while. You got something to eat?”
“Oh, yeah. Had a pit stop a while back and got a sandwich. I’m fine.”
