Silencer (10 page)

Eddie McTell said, ‘Done.
Finito.
'

Dansk didn't speak. His drink arrived and the waitress departed, leaving a pleasing mango fragrance in the air. He followed her skimpy little dress and long legs with his eyes, a reflex action.

‘Pussy on stilts, hey,' McTell said.

Dansk ignored this.

McTell said, ‘We got her. Out in the desert.'

‘Spare me the details,' Dansk said.

‘The dogs added a neat touch,' McTell said.

‘That's a detail.'

McTell shrugged. ‘So we can get out of this town now anyway. This fucking heat, you can keep it.'

Dansk sipped his soda. He looked at McTell's thin face. The beard was an attempt to give the face some hint of intelligence, but it didn't work. It looked glued-on, a spy's beard.

McTell picked up his lager. ‘
Vaya con dios
,' he said.

Dansk watched McTell slug his drink and asked, ‘When you were a kid, how did you see your future?'

‘My future? You mean, like ambitions?'

‘You must have dreamed of something, McTell. Fireman. Engine driver. Super jock, last-minute touchdown, your pick of the cheerleaders. Making it big some way.'

‘I used to be a wizard on ice-skates.'

‘You thought hockey. A future in hockey.'

McTell shook his head. ‘I tried out for a team in Boston one time, but I guess I lacked some quality they were looking for.'

‘Maybe it was grace, McTell.'

‘Grace. Yeah, maybe. Funny, my first wife was called Grace. Grace Spatsky. Polack broad with tits out to here.'

Dansk had no interest in McTell's matrimonial history. He said, ‘I had a notion of becoming a missionary. Doing good. Working in a leper colony maybe. I used to study maps. Places with names like Chad. The Ivory Coast.'

McTell grinned and stroked his beard. ‘A missionary?'

‘You think that's funny?'

‘Just that kids think funny things. No offence.'

Dansk wondered why he'd bothered to mention this childhood fancy to McTell. Everything you said to McTell vanished inside a black hole. It was like sending a message into outer space because McTell was an inferior creature, barely a notch above the kind you saw all the time in K-Marts, pushing carts and surrounded by a squabble of snotty-nosed kids and waddling wives, or in late-night supermarkets stocking up on monster frozen pizzas and a gross of Danish. They lived in trailer parks with broken windows and crooked satellite dishes, or in subsidized housing with cockroaches and graffiti. They gorged themselves on Snickers bars and potato chips. They watched Oprah and thought they were checking the pulse of America. These people operated on weak batteries.

The sad thing, they didn't know they were empty and stupid. They had a certain animal cunning, but in reality they were on this earth to run the errands, to do the dark stuff somebody like Dansk wanted done.

Dansk pushed his glass away. He'd had enough of McTell's company. The beard depressed him, so did the light-blue jacket and the necktie the colour of a dead salmon.

Dansk stood up, reflecting on the fact that in this business you had to work with guys like McTell.

‘Me and Pasquale, we'll just head out, I guess,' McTell said.

‘Go to Vegas, stay at the usual place,' Dansk said. ‘I'll be in touch. There's another piece of work coming up in Seattle.'

Dansk turned to leave.

McTell said, ‘Oh yeah, Pasquale shot the dogs. Took them somewhere off the freeway and shot them. Smack between the eyes.'

Dansk knew McTell was telling him this because it might rile him a little. He pictured canine heads blown away and bloody fur. He kept going. In the lobby he passed the concierge's desk, stopped sharply and wheeled back round again. He approached the desk.

The concierge looked at Dansk with the general ass-clenched expression of concierges the world over. There had to be some kind of college where these characters learned how to patronize.

‘Can I help you, sir?'

Dansk didn't answer. He picked up a newspaper from the stack on the guy's desk. The
Arizona Republic
with the word ‘Complimentary' stamped on it.

‘Help yourself,' said the concierge.

‘Yeah,' Dansk said.

Halfway down the front page, a single column. There it was. A jolt. He walked back inside the bar.

He stood over McTell and said, ‘Forget Vegas. Vegas is off the fucking menu.'

Dansk drew up the chair that was still warm from before and stared at McTell.

‘Something wrong?' McTell asked.

Dansk tossed the newspaper down on the table. ‘I take it you can read.'

McTell looked at the front page for a time without expression. Dansk snatched the paper back out of his hands and said, ‘Let's take a stroll. Get some air.'

‘I hate the air around here,' McTell said.

Dansk said, ‘Move, Eddie. Don't give me any friction, I'm not in the mood.'

Outside in the heat Dansk sweated: the back of his neck and armpits. His perspiration displeased him. Liquid oozing through pores, impurities leaking from the system. He walked, followed by McTell, until he came to a small square on the edge of downtown where office workers, sprawled here and there on the sunny grass, ate health-conscious lunches. Men in white shirts, women in crisp blouses. They had the look of minor civil servants. They were clocking down their time until it was retirement day. Here's your pension. Enjoy.

A guy in wire-framed glasses laughed at something. The girl who kneeled beside him, a half moon of pitta bread in her skinny hand, spluttered. There was a sense of things in their rightful place and lunches that lasted a regulation thirty minutes and amusing office gossip. Let's kill the supervisor. Let's poison his pastrami sandwich.

Dansk drew a hand across his wet forehead and sat under a shady tree. McTell hunkered down on his heels and let his arms dangle between his legs. Dansk had a feeling of anger so intense it seemed a thing apart from himself, a seething
doppelgänger
, another Anthony in another dimension.

He thrust the newspaper under McTell's nose with such vigour he might have intended to shove it up the man's nostrils. ‘Quote unquote. “The body of Reuben Galindez, forty-seven, was found in the Little Colorado River on the Navaho Indian reservation by Sergeant Charles House. Police reports blah, blah, blah, gunshot wound blah, blah, blah. Galindez turned State's evidence against Victor Sanchez et cetera et cetera. Homicide detective Lieutenant William Drumm of the Phoenix Police Department attended the forensic examination in Flagstaff rhubarb, rhubarb. With him was Amanda Scholes, the prosecutor in the sensational trial of Sanchez, now on death row. Neither Lieutenant Drumm nor Miss Scholes were available for comment.”'

‘Yeah, yeah, I read it, Anthony.'

Dansk said, ‘I'm seeing Galindez float down a river like driftwood, and I don't like the image. I don't like it from any angle. I don't like any of this. You didn't tell me this was the way it happened.'

McTell said, ‘Pasquale shot him, but the current was too fucking fast, and it wasn't like there was a full moon or nothing. We figured maybe he'd –'

‘Maybe he'd what? Dissolve in the water like goddam Alka-Seltzer? Or were you under the illusion there were piranha in the river and they'd eat him?'

‘Piranha?' McTell smiled his dull brute smile. ‘More like decompose someplace, the river bottom, like that.'

‘Dead people float, McTell. Unless you weigh them down, they have this unfortunate tendency to surface.'

Dansk sighed and looked up at the sky. How high and blue it was. Up, up and away. McTell acted on his thoughts the way a chunk of Kryptonite affected Superman.

‘He drifts down the river, and
then
who enters the picture? Look,
look
. Black and fucking white.'

‘So what?'

‘So
what
? He's only a homicide cop and she's only the goddam prosecutor whose last case was Victor Sanchez. I'm trying to run a discreet little disposal business here. Some business. Galindez floats out of sight down a fucking river and a woman the size of Minnie Mouse has you running your asses off.'

McTell shuffled his feet in the grass. ‘Yeah, but we got her, Anthony.'

‘Sure you got her. That's what you're paid for, McTell: getting people. Only now we have a goddam homicide cop
and
this former prosecutor bitch, and they're rolling around inside my head like very loud fucking marbles and I'm thinking, Maybe they're not just gonna drop this matter. Maybe they're gonna be intrigued, McTell.'

‘Hey, they're a problem, no sweat, no big deal, we can fix them,' McTell said.

‘A homicide cop and a former prosecutor and you can fix them, huh?'

‘Listen. Anybody can be fixed.'

‘All your solutions come down to the same thing: blow somebody away. Here's a problem, let's blast it into oblivion.'

‘Saves time and trouble in the long haul.'

Dansk tried to imagine how Einstein felt in a bus station, say, surrounded by morons. How he felt standing in a cafeteria line for a hot dog and fries and listening to empty drones chatter about last night's soaps.

He looked across the grassy square. He admired how the freshly laundered office workers gathered up their trash before they left. House-trained. Picky-picky. They worked in smoke-free zones and drank bottled water and belonged to health clubs and had mortgages and good credit ratings. They were respectable, central to the way the country worked. The machinery couldn't turn without them. Politicians drooled for their votes.

He found himself imagining what would happen if a passing gunman opened fire on this bunch just for the sport of it. He saw blood spilling across grass, white shirts red, people screaming and diving for cover, total chaos. He thought of snipers in towers and fertilizer bombs in vans parked outside government buildings and deranged sorts in the badlands who were at odds with revenue officials. This is America, bulletproof vest country, where you don't sit with your back to the door. The nation was bent out of shape.

He rose, brushed blades of grass from his slacks and looked at McTell. What was it about killers, why were they so well-endowed in the vicious department and so challenged when it came to brains? You took what you could find, he thought. It wasn't like you could go down to an employment bureau and ask for assassins. McTell and Pasquale came out of sewers. All they knew was death. It was a limited kind of understanding. They enjoyed killing, it thrilled them. It was their own crazed theatre.

He pondered this, what it would be like to buy a ticket and go inside. Snuff scenes at the Blood Bijou. People blown away. Carnage galore. And maybe when you slept you dreamed of human slaughterhouses and corpses hanging upside down from hooks, skinned and de-veined and raw.

He watched McTell yank a daisy out of the ground and destroy it one petal at a time, and he wondered if flowers felt pain and anguish, if this daisy was screaming at some level beyond the range of human hearing. The thought intrigued him. Noises you couldn't hear, a place beyond the net of the senses.

He said, ‘We'll wait, keep an eye on the situation, see what comes up. Then I'll decide. It's not like there's any bonus money in it for giving them the ultimate good-night kiss, McTell.'

‘No bonus money?' McTell asked.

‘None. And if you don't like that, take it up with your union.'

19

The first thing Amanda heard when she returned to the house was a female voice. Rhees had a student with him in the living-room, a willowy girl with straight, long blond hair. She looked as if she'd strolled out of a shampoo commercial. A yellow nimbus hung about her.

‘Amanda,' Rhees said, ‘this is Polly Svensen. Polly's doing post-grad work next semester.'

The student smiled. Amanda smiled back. Polly Svensen was, well, simply stunning. She had the kind of astonishing beauty that quickened men's hearts and sent thrilled whispers running through crowded rooms. Her neck's just a little too long, Amanda thought.

‘I didn't expect Professor Rhees to be at home. I was just dropping off my paper,' Polly said. ‘I heard he was out of town.'

‘Lo and behold,' Amanda said, frost in her voice. ‘Here he is. The man himself.'

Polly was all false modesty. She knew she was a knockout. Slender, five-eleven, faded skin-tight blue jeans and a white halter, and her cute little navel showing. She knew she changed the weather wherever she went.

Rhees frowned at Amanda and said, ‘We were just discussing the role of nature in Dylan Thomas.'

‘Mmm, interesting,' Amanda said. Rhees had access to a surfeit of girls. He met them one on one in his office, tutorial fashion. She wasn't normally threatened by these academic tête-à-têtes, but today things were just coming at her and she felt defenceless.

She said, ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, et cetera.'

Polly said, ‘Right. You're familiar with Dylan.'

Dylan. Polly was just the type to be on first-name terms with dead poets.

Amanda said, ‘A few lines, that's all.'

‘He's worth getting into,' Polly said. ‘There's this really marvellous deep underlying green thing. “About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green”, you know?'

‘And all this time I thought he wrote about jerking off. Goes to show.'

Polly had a distinctive giggle. Somebody had probably told her once it was real neat, so she reproduced it whenever she could.

Rhees got up from the table and cleared his throat. He indicated with a gesture of his head that he wanted a moment of privacy with Amanda. He went into the kitchen and Amanda followed. He shut the door and crossed his arms.

‘You're being rude,' he said.

‘Am I?'

‘You know you are.' Rhees reached out and touched her shoulder. ‘This isn't like you, Amanda.'