John Lutz Bundle (144 page)

And a drink.

“…and they didn’t know if the parrot was saying everything
he
was saying, or if
he
was saying everything the parrot was saying.”

The crowd in Say What? thought about it, then with a growing rush of applause decided they liked that one. They cheered and hooted as Jackie Jameson waved his right arm over his head in a circular motion, dipped low in his exaggerated bow, and trotted off the stage.

Mitzi and Rob (he had finally told her his name—Rob Curlew) were seated at the table Rob preferred. It was barely large enough for two, so they wouldn’t attract unwanted company. It was also at the very edge of the crowd, and not far from one of the side exits. Not only could they look out over the audience so Mitzi could judge crowd reaction to particular jokes, but when the night of comedy and near comedy ended, they could easily slip outside and get away without having to talk to anyone Mitzi knew. Rob valued his privacy. Mitzi understood that and accommodated him.

Tonight was different, however, because her boss Ted Tack was holding her check from last week, and Mitzi needed the money. The rent was past due, and the landlord was pesky.

Jackie Jameson had been the final act, so Mitzi and Rob waited for the applause to trail off, then stood up from their table.

Mitzi started toward a side aisle so she could make her way to the stage and office. Rob closed his hand on her arm.

Mitzi explained that she had to pick up her paycheck.

“I can carry us till next week,” Rob said.

Mitzi aimed her big smile at him. “In case you haven’t noticed, you carried us all this week. You wouldn’t want me sleeping with the landlord. I need my money, baby.”

“You mean your independence.”

“Up the rebels! Whatever it is they’re against.”

Rob smiled and kissed her cheek. “I’ll be waiting right outside.”

“It’ll only take a few minutes for Ted to pay me or for me to punch him out,” Mitzi said. She waved a small fist. “He always pays.”

“Remember I’m nearby,” Rob said, “in case there’s any trouble.” As if she was serious.

Mitizi wondered sometimes if
he
was serious, some of the things he said. Or maybe it was because he was normally so smooth that any slightly out-of-kilter remark seemed even more so.

As she moved away through the crowd that was gradually making its way outside, she wondered what kind of job Rob had, that he worried so little about money. Something to do with investments, he’d say, whenever she inquired, then he’d begin explaining things to her she didn’t understand. There were lots of acronyms, but they all meant money. So maybe he was rich as well as handsome.

I am makin’ out with The Man.

Somebody or something tugged at her right earlobe, and she turned, ready to cut some poor bastard off at the knees if she could figure out who’d been the tugger.

I better know you as a friend.

She did. Jackie Jameson was jammed up against her by the press of the crowd.

Her momentary anger was gone. She grinned at him. “Nice set, Jackie.”

“Yours, too.” He cupped his hands over his chest. “Wanna go lift a few, Mitz? Talkin’ drinks here, not boobs.”

“Sorry, Jackie, I’m going out with Rob.”

Jameson made a big thing of looking all around. “So where is he?”

“Waiting outside.”

“What is this guy, some kinda secret agent? You helping him hide?”

“He likes privacy, is all.”

“Then he should like you. You’re sure keeping him a big secret.”

“I kinda enjoy that, him and me together, nobody around to applaud or boo.”

“Oh, I’m sure they’d applaud, Mitz.”

She grinned again. “I gotta go, get to the office before Ted makes his escape with my paycheck.”

“Maybe Rob’d like to have a drink or two with us,” Jackie said, as Mitzi was moving away in the general direction of stage and office.

“Oh, yeah, we’d both love having you around. In case conversation started to drag.”

“I’m jealous, Mitz. You noticed?”

“Of me?”

“Of him,” Jackie said. “I’m better for you, Mitz.”

“It’s illegal in this state for two comics to be that way with each other,” Mitzi said.

“Is he prepared to be your love slave, like I am?”

“You’re more a love jester, Jackie.”

She was immediately sorry she’d said it. He turned away to hide the pain on his face.

When he turned back, he was smiling.

She bit her lower lip. “That was a horseshit remark. I didn’t mean it, Jackie, honest.”

“Sure you didn’t.”

“Will a blow job make it up?”

“I get the point,” he said, “you say things you don’t mean. Just be careful, Mitz.”

“Of what?”

“Banana peels, that kinda thing.” He gave her a wave and turned his back on her.

“Hey! Hey, Jackie! Don’t go away mad!”

Even that had come out wrong.
Just go away
hung in the air. Two comics. Maybe it was a good law.

Jackie probably hadn’t heard her anyway. He was deep into the crowd that was massing toward the street doors. She could just make out his dark head of hair with its bald spot, then he was gone. Hurt and gone, like so many people in her life.

Why am I always hurting people, or getting hurt?

Feeling paper-edge high, Mitzi continued her way to the stage steps and the office. She knew she’d deeply cut Jackie, maybe her only true friend and one of the last people in the universe she was willing to hurt, and she vowed she’d make it up to him. She wouldn’t apologize—that would only remind him of what she’d so thoughtlessly said and embarrass him some more. What was needed here was a kind of indirect apology, giving away a piece of herself without it being obvious. Mitzi was good at that. She’d been doing it since she was a little girl.

Ten minutes later, her check in her purse, she met Rob outside in front of the club, beneath the lighted marquee.
Nobody looks that good in all that bright light coming from overhead,
she thought.
Not even me.
She clutched his arm, turning her head slightly away from him and the sickly light, as she led him out farther down the sidewalk.

They walked a few blocks to a small, dimly lighted sports bar they frequented. There were booths toward the back, where serious drinkers and lovers sat, leaving the front booths to the sports nuts who sat hypnotized by taped ball games while raising the alcohol level of their blood.

“You seem kind of down,” Rob said, when they were settled in with their drinks. She had an apple martini, he a scotch on the rocks.

Mitzi told him what had happened with Jackie.

“I feel kind of sorry for him, too,” Rob said. Then he smiled. “But I don’t blame him for being jealous.”

They sat for a few minutes in silence, sipping their drinks. There was cheering from the front of the bar.

“Home-run volume,” Rob said.

“Maybe,” Mitzi said. “I don’t know how they can get so into it. Both the Mets and Yankees games have been over for hours. They already know who won.”

“They like to pretend, like everybody else.”

“What are you, running for political office?”

He gave her his hooded-eyes smile, melting her down. The bastard was into her even deeper than he knew, making her vulnerable. Vulnerability was something she loathed. “Mitzi, Mitzi…always the tough front.”

She shrugged. “I’m just pretending, like everyone else.”

“You should cheer up, sweet. You’ve got a birthday coming up next week.”

“How’d you know that?”

Does he know how old I’m going to be? Twenty-five. Holy Christ! How’d that happen? Twenty-five already, and at a place like Say What?
She didn’t even have top billing

“You must’ve mentioned it,” he said.

“Not me.”

“Somebody else, then. Or maybe it was on your Web site.”

“There is
nothing
true on my Web site.”

He laughed. “I know that’s your photo.”

“It’s my mother when she was my age.”

“Can’t you ever be serious, Mitzi?”

“Only when I’m being funny.”

“We should celebrate your birthday.”

“Day of mourning,” Mitzi said. “Don’t even think of buying me a present, Rob, really.”

“No whoop-de-do?”

“Not even whoop.”

He studied her over the rim of his glass. She couldn’t read his eyes, so dark in the dim lounge, but with pinpoints of light or something else in their centers.

“Okay,” he said. “But maybe I’ll bring you flowers.”

“That could work,” she said.

Lavern Neeson sat in what had become her usual place, holding the shotgun from the closet loosely aimed at her sleeping husband.

The shotgun was exerting more and more of a spell on Lavern. She and Hobbs had argued again this evening about what for most couples would be nothing. They’d disagreed over who’d said what about some insignificant subject, and Hobbs, as usual, took the argument from the specific to the general. He accused Lavern of constantly saying things and then swearing she’d never uttered the words.

Lavern’s friend and sometimes confidante, Bess, said that manipulating men claimed such things sometimes, for no purpose other than to instill uncertainty and guilt in a woman’s mind. According to records at the Broken Wing Women’s Shelter, it wasn’t all that unusual for men to create devices that would make sounds in the basement or garage so that they could skeptically go investigate and then return to reassure and tell their frightened mates that they’d only imagined hearing something. If the sound came again, the abuser might simply claim he hadn’t heard it, knowing full well it was real because he’d arranged for it.

Was it any wonder women subjected to that sort of treatment began to doubt their own sanity?

Something else: Lavern suspected that Hobbs might be moving objects when she wasn’t looking, so she’d think she’d forgotten where she’d put things. Was she misplacing more and more objects lately—keys, her purse, half-read books, the cell phone—or was it that Hobbs was stepping up his program of shifting her reality so she could distinguish it less and less from her imagination? That’s what Bess said it was called at the shelter: shifting the victim’s reality.

Lavern knew the shotgun was real, even if it remained unloaded. If Hobbs were to awaken and stare into its dark muzzle, he wouldn’t know the breach was empty. Lavern smiled. Let the bastard think he was a second away from death. Shift
his
reality.

Do I really want him to wake up?

She thought about what Hobbs would do once he realized she’d pointed an unloaded shotgun at him. Made him so frightened he’d pissed in his pants. Took away some of his manhood.

What would he do then?

Lavern knew, so as she sat alongside the bed fondling the shotgun and watching Hobbs sleep, she was very careful not to wake him.

It was exactly like that snob Thomas Rhodes to try leaving town in the means of transportation anyone who knew him would figure as his last choice. As for renting a car, Dunn knew that like many wealthy New Yorkers who’d moved to the city years ago, Rhodes had let his out-of-state driver’s license expire. These days he traveled mostly by limo.

Dunn had studied the dossier on Rhodes with the utmost care and hadn’t been fooled.

The hunter inside the mind of the prey. Two heads, one mind. Older than mankind.

Dunn’s heart beat a stronger rhythm as his fingers caressed the compact .25-caliber revolver in his pocket. It was cool and heavy. Hefty for its size. Deadly.

Be careful, not cocky. Doing this wrong could cost you your life. You’d barely have time to realize you were the hunted instead of the hunter.

Every hunt should be like this.

While it scared the hell out of him, Dunn loved this part of it. He wasn’t good ol’ Jer’ now; he was Thomas Rhodes’s final nightmare walking.

Though it was evening, the Port Authority Terminal was crowded, which was exactly how Dunn preferred it. There would be a loud, echoing noise at the boarding gates, startling everyone, momentarily freezing them, and giving Dunn time to act while Rhodes was dying. To onlookers—those few who actually looked his way—the memory of what was about to happen would always at best be a series of mental stills, scenes like obscure slides or photographs that would, day by day, fade until they were impossible to interpret for sure. When it came to dealing this kind of death, there was, strangely enough, safety in numbers. So much to take in, so much sensory overload. Dunn was counting on it. He had only to act decisively, rapidly, and not waste motion.

Dunn had found a spot to watch the lower level, where tickets were sold by the various bus lines. There were boarding gates on several levels, but Rhodes would have to stop here first to purchase his ticket.

As Dunn had projected, Rhodes was attempting to flee the city by bus. After he’d bought his ticket, it had been simple for Dunn to follow him to the second level, where most of the gates were located, along with some shops and restaurants.

The “gates” were actually doors that led out to a concrete area where the buses came and went, disgorging and taking on passengers. Lines of people were standing or sitting on the floor, waiting for doors to open so they could board.

Rhodes made his way to Gate 322 in the North Terminal.

A bus was about to board, and another, nearby, was letting out passengers. According to the schedule Dunn had studied, the bus unloading was from Buffalo, New York. Thomas Rhodes had dipped into his duffel bag and changed clothes, then switched bags. He was now dressed in a hooded green nylon rain parka and carrying a backpack (another deliberately out-of-character affectation), and was about to board the bus soon to depart for Pittsburgh. Dunn figured Rhodes’s ticket was a transfer and would take him farther away than Pittsburgh—if it were used.

This was good. The crowd was starting to coalesce and queue up for the boarding area outside Gate 322.

Staying to one side, and then approaching at a three-quarter angle so Rhodes wouldn’t see him, Dunn walked directly toward the figure in the green parka. It was an obviously new coat, and though it was light and meant to protect only against rain, it was still too hot a garment for this kind of weather; Rhodes should have known better than that.

Or maybe the damned thing was made of Kevlar and bulletproof.

If you guess wrong…

Dunn almost smiled. Bulletproof or not, it wouldn’t save Rhodes from fate in the person of Jerry Dunn. Rhodes was the one animal, and Dunn the one hunter. For both men, nothing else existed in the universe.

Rhodes was on the outskirts of the people about to board, when the door opened.

Some had made it through the door and a small crowd was milling in the direction of the parked bus. Public address announcements no one on earth could understand floated and echoed in the warm air.

Dunn’s mouth was dry. Don’t let him get outside. Take him inside. Take him inside.

He was twenty feet from his quarry.

Fifteen.

If his wife and coworkers could see him now. Who of them would have guessed? Ol’ Jer…

Make it right, a first accurate shot, then hammer back and a second quick squeeze of the trigger to make sure. Then claim Rhodes’s gun for your trophy, stay calm, and walk fast from the scene.

Stay calm.

Closer, closer…

Six feet away.

The compact revolver came out of Dunn’s coat pocket. His arm was pointed rigidly straight ahead, at Rhodes’s right temple. He thumbed back the hammer. Rhodes seemed to sense Dunn’s presence and began to turn.

Three feet.

He’s turning! Squeeze! Squeeze!

Rhodes’s eye that Dunn could see began to widen.

There was a sound like two loud, sharp slaps, very close together.

Thomas Rhodes dropped like an electrically powered being whose plug had been yanked. As he fell, Dunn was already moving to kneel in unison with his dead quarry’s descent. Dropping with him in grotesque choreography, only alive and with a purpose. Slipping his own gun into a pocket, extending an arm.

Rhodes fell to his knees and flopped forward, his face making a nasty sound as it smacked nose first into concrete. Dunn was already reaching into Rhodes’s right pants pocket for his gun.

It wasn’t there. The pocket was empty.

Should have checked somehow. Made sure. Damn, damn, damn…

Dunn felt the outside of Rhodes’s left pants pocket.

No gun.

He clutched and squeezed at the oversized green parka’s pockets. A foul stench wafted up from Rhodes’s body. He’d been sweating heavily in the parka, or maybe his sphincter had let loose as he died.

Blood now. On Rhodes’s face. On the parka’s hood.

Damn, damn, damn…

Still no gun. But would he be able to feel it under the coat’s bunched and slippery material?

He wondered if the gun might be in a holster or tucked in Rhodes’s belt in the small of his back. He began to feel, probing the wadded coat frantically, digging with his fingers.

And became aware of people around him watching. Beginning to stir.

Dunn knew his time was up. The opportunity to procure Rhodes’s gun had passed.

He’d failed.

He stood up as planned and began walking swiftly away, feeling sweat trickling down his ribs. Down his forehead.

He walked faster, faster, and then began to run.

A man’s voice shouted behind him, but the PA system was yammering at the same time, so Dunn didn’t know what the man had yelled. He was aware of other people running now, but past him in the opposite direction to see what was going on.

Dimly he recalled passing one of the stairways leading down to the main level. He turned and ran in the same direction as so many others, blended with them for half a dozen strides until he reached the steps; then down he went as people continued to flash past on the periphery of his vision.

He made his way at a brisk walk through the crowded terminal and back out onto the sidewalk. He kept walking along Eighth Avenue, the gum-soled shoes he’d bought for his first hunt beating silently on the warm concrete, turned a corner, kept walking.

Away! Free!

After a while he slowed down. He was so hot.
Is it ever going to rain again in this damned city?

His entire body was burning up and soaked in perspiration, as if with a fever. He clutched his shirt collar and yanked it to the side, causing one of the top buttons to fly off into the night.

Kept walking.

But without Thomas Rhodes’s gun.

The man in the matching black outfit broke the connection on his cell phone and slipped it into his shirt pocket. He was at an outside table at a restaurant on Second Avenue, sipping a cold draft beer and watching pedestrians and traffic hurrying past. So many people in a rush, scurrying and self-important. So many ambitions, dreams, obsessions, depressions, so much tenderness and callousness…all those separate, personal worlds and worlds-to-be that could be obliterated in a second by a thousand possibilities. All those people…their disparate notions of reality didn’t mean spit. Reality wasn’t so different from dreams.

Dreams…

He knew as he watched a particularly graceful woman walking across the street that it was time for Mitzi. Not that the woman looked at all like Mitzi except for her erect and alert carriage. She was much taller than Mitzi. And of course she didn’t have Mitzi’s platinum spiked hair.

Mitzi the birthday girl. Thinking of her did bring a smile to his face. She certainly had the gift.

A waiter who’d just delivered food to a nearby table paused on his way back inside the restaurant, noticing the almost-empty beer mug.

“Ready for another?” he asked.

“Sure am,” the man in the black outfit answered, “I’m ready for another.”