The Good Guy (7 page)

Her stare was not sharp any longer, but as solemn and knowing as the sea, and it seemed to him that right then she took down into her depths a new understanding of him.

“They’re open twenty-four hours,” she said. “We could just sit here until he goes away.”

“We could tell ourselves he isn’t really out there, it’s someone else, nothing to do with us. We could tell ourselves all the way out the door, just walk into it and get it over with. A lot of people would.”

She said, “Not a lot would have in 1939.”

“Too bad your Ford isn’t a real time machine.”

“I’d go back there. I’d go back all the way. Jack Benny on the radio, Benny Goodman from the Empire Room of the Waldorf-Astoria…”

He reminded her: “Hitler in Czechoslovakia, in Poland…”

“I’d go back to it all.”

The waitress asked if they wanted anything more. Tim requested the check.

Still no one had gotten out of the white Chevy. Traffic on the street had diminished. The incoming tide of clouds had extinguished the moon.

When the waitress brought the check, Tim had the money ready to pay it and to tip her.

“Turn right in the alley,” he reminded Linda. “Run to the end of the block. Look for me coming west on the main street.”

They slid out of the booth. She put a hand on his arm, and for a moment he thought she was going to kiss him on the cheek, but then she turned away.

Under his belt, the gun felt cold against his abdomen.

Twelve

W
hen Tim Carrier pushed through the glass
door and exited the coffee shop, all the air seemed to have escaped the night, leaving a vacuum that could not sustain him.

Along the street, with swish and clatter, queen palms shuddered in a freshening breeze that belied the impression of airlessness.

After a shallow breath gave way to a deeper one, he was all right, and he was ready.

His paralysis had not been caused by fear of Kravet, but by dread of what would come after he dealt with Kravet. Over the years, he had successfully sought anonymity. This time it might elude him.

Pretending to be at ease, showing no interest in the distant Chevy, he walked directly to the Explorer. Behind the wheel, when the interior lights went off, he glanced once toward the suspect vehicle.

From this better vantage point, he could see a man in the car, the gray smear of a face. He was not close enough to discern any details, and couldn’t tell if this might be the man to whom he had given ten thousand dollars in the tavern.

Tim withdrew the pistol from under his belt and put it on the passenger’s seat.

He started the engine but didn’t switch on the headlights. At little more than an idle, he coasted toward the restaurant, as though intending to pick up Linda near the entrance.

In the rearview mirror, he saw the driver’s door of the Chevy open. A tall man got out.

As the Explorer neared the restaurant and began to pull parallel to it, the man from the Chevy approached. He kept his head down, as if in thought.

When the guy came out of the shadows and into the parking-lot lights, he proved to be of a size and a physical type that matched the killer.

Tim braked to a stop, apparently waiting for Linda, but in fact luring his adversary as far from the Chevrolet as he dared. If he delayed too long, the gunman might suddenly sprint to the Explorer and shoot him dead in the driver’s seat.

About forty yards directly ahead was an exit from the parking lot. Tim waited perhaps a beat longer than he should have, then switched on the headlights, tramped the accelerator, and raced toward the street.

Fate plays with loaded dice, so of course the light traffic abruptly became heavier. An eastbound trio of vehicles brightened toward him in excess of the speed limit.

Expecting a gunshot, glittering glass, and a bullet to the brain, Tim remained committed to flight. As the Explorer shot into the street, however, he realized that the momentum lost in a right turn would ensure that one or all of the approaching vehicles would tail-end him.

Brakes shrieked, horns blared, headlights seemed to sear him. Instead of turning right, he highballed straight across the two eastbound lanes.

Without a further scream of brakes, although with a vigorous condemnation of horns, two cars and a panel truck sailed past behind him. Not one vehicle so much as kissed the Explorer’s bumper, but their turbulent breath buffeted it.

When he barreled into the westbound lanes, oncoming traffic was at a safe distance but closing fast. Turning west, he glanced south, and saw that Kravet had sprinted back to the Chevrolet. The killer was in the driver’s seat, pulling the door shut.

Tim continued turning, out of the westbound lanes, crossing the yellow median lines. He drove east, into the wake of the traffic with which he had almost collided.

As he drew near the next major intersection, he checked the rearview mirror, then a side mirror, and saw the Chevy exiting the coffee-shop parking lot.

With no respect for the stop sign, Tim hung a hard left turn, drove only fifteen yards north on a quiet cross street of older two-story homes, executed a U-turn, and pulled to the curb. He came to a stop facing the broader avenue that he had just departed, left the engine running, and killed the headlights.

He snatched up the pistol, threw open the door, got out of the SUV, stepped into the street, and assumed a shooting stance, both hands on the weapon.

The Chevy, out of sight but on its way, sounded like it had a much bigger engine than an ordinary sedan, confirming that it had been upgraded for pursuits and, regardless of what the DMV claimed, might be a supercharged police bucket.

The glow of headlights bloomed, and a moment later the Chevy cut the corner.

Point-blank, at risk of being run down, Tim squeezed off three shots, aiming not at the windshield, not at the driver’s-side window, but at the front tire as the car swept past him, fired two more rounds at the rear tire. He saw the front rubber deflate and peel, and maybe he got the back tire, too.

Surprised, no doubt expecting to be shot himself, the driver lost control. The sedan jumped the curb, sheered off a fire hydrant, and slammed through a wooden fence in a shower of splintered pickets and a flailing mass of climbing-rose vines.

A geyser erupted from the stump of the standpipe where the hydrant had been, a thick column of water that surged thirty feet into the night.

As the Chevy rocked to a stop on the lawn, Tim considered going to it and pulling open the driver’s door. Kravet might be stunned, briefly disoriented. Perhaps he could be dragged out of the car and relieved of whatever weapons he might have before he was able to use one of them.

Tim didn’t want to kill Kravet. He needed to know who had hired him. Linda would never be safe until they knew the identity of the man who had put the money on the bar.

A bent cop who carried out contract killings on the side would be too tough to be cracked by a threat alone. But if the hot muzzle of a pistol was stretching one of his nostrils to the tearing point, and if, eye to eye, he had sufficient instinct to read correctly his adversary’s capacity for violence, he might spill the name. He was not, after all, a man of honor.

Even as the Chevy sagged to a halt, porch lights came on at the house in front of which the car had landed, and a bearded man with a beer belly stepped out of the front door.

The water gushed skyward under great pressure and crashed back to the pavement in such noisy cascades that a police siren might not be audible until the squad car had closed to within half a block of the scene.

Splashing through torrents of foaming water, Tim hurried to the Explorer.

He put the pistol on the passenger’s seat. According to Linda, it held an eight-round magazine. He had fired five.

Not only boldness is required for the successful implementation of any strategy, but also calculated and economical action.

As Tim drove to the nearby intersection, he saw the Chevy trying to reverse off the lawn. The rear wheels spit out a spray of sod and mud and white rose petals, and the car seemed to have trouble gaining traction.

With at least one blown tire and untold other damage, the Chevy was in no condition to mount an effective pursuit.

In addition to calculated and economical action, however, a wise man expects the unexpected.

Instead of crossing the intersection in full sight of Kravet and heading south, where Linda waited, Tim swung left. He switched on the headlights and sped east two blocks, rounded a gradual curve that put him beyond Kravet’s view, and only then turned right on a cross street.

He kept glancing at the rearview mirror, and he was alert, but his mind repeatedly went back to the gunfire, to the five crisp shots.

The pistol had a slick double-action trigger pull that felt like it broke at just about seven pounds.

The recoil-spring weight seemed to be about sixteen pounds, good enough for standard-pressure ammo.

The piece had felt remarkably comfortable in his grip.

He didn’t know what to think about that.

He told himself that not just any gun would have served him so agreeably, that the credit belonged entirely to this fine compact weapon, but he knew that he was lying to himself.

Thirteen

W
alking to the rear of the coffee shop, Linda
glanced back just once and saw the front door closing behind Tim after he had stepped out into the night.

Although she had known him only a few hours, the thought of never seeing him again pinched off her breath.

He had chosen to help her when he could have left her to the wolves. She had no reason to expect that he would choose to leave her life as unexpectedly as he had entered.

No reason except experience. Sooner or later, everyone walked out. Or they fell through a crack in the floor. Or they were pulled screaming down into the crack, unable to hold fast, gone.

Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom.

Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open the door and let anyone in, not all the way in. You risked the hard-won equilibrium, the tranquility that you called
peace
.

She didn’t think he would get himself shot, not here tonight, not when his guard was up. He had a way about him that suggested he knew things, that he was not a man who would be killed easily.

Nevertheless, she was prepared to walk to the end of the alley and wait, and wait, and never see him again.

As she reached the door to the kitchen, it opened toward her. A waitress came out, balancing on one arm a tray of food-laden dishes.

“Kitchen, honey,” she advised Linda. “Employees only.”

“Sorry. I was looking for the restroom.”

“There you go,” said the waitress, indicating a door to the right.

Linda stepped into a lavatory that smelled of pine disinfectant and wet paper towels. She waited a moment, left the room, and went into the kitchen, where the smells were markedly better.

Past ovens, past a long cooktop, past deep fryers full of hot oil, smiling at a short-order cook, nodding at another, she traversed two-thirds of the kitchen before a man with large ear lobes rounded a tall storage rack and almost collided with her.

She would not have noticed the size of his lobes if he had not worn studs: a tiny silver rose in the left, a ruby in the right.

Otherwise, he looked like a bodybuilder with a soap obsession and exhaustive knowledge of every detail of every Quentin Tarantino movie: pumped, scrubbed, and nerdy. Pinned to his white shirt, a name tag declared D
ENNIS
J
OLLY/NIGHT MANAGER
.

“What’re you doing here?” he asked.

Because he blocked the narrow aisle and she could not slip past him, she said, “I’m looking for the back door.”

“Only employees are allowed here.”

“Yes, I understand. Sorry for the intrusion. I’ll just use the back door and be gone.”

“I can’t allow you to do that, ma’am. You’ll have to leave the kitchen.”

In spite of the earrings and his red necktie, he managed to appear solemn and mantled in authority.

She said, “That’s what I want to do. I want to leave the kitchen by the back door.”

“Ma’am, you’ll have to leave the way you came in.”

“But the back door is closer. If I go out the way I came in, I’ll be in the kitchen longer than if I just use the back door.”

By now, Tim might have driven out of the parking lot. If Kravet didn’t follow the Explorer, if he came into the coffee shop looking for Linda, she needed to be gone.

The manager said, “If you don’t have money to pay your check, we won’t make an issue of it.”

“My date is paying the check. He thinks I’m in the ladies’ room. I don’t want to leave with him. I want to leave on my own.”

Dennis Jolly’s scrubbed-pink face paled, and his dishwater eyes widened with alarm. “Is he violent? I don’t want him back here, angry and looking for you.”

“Look at you. You’re way pumped. You could handle anyone.”

“Count me out. What do I need to handle anyone for?”

She changed tack. “Anyway, he’s not violent. He’s just a creep. He’s all hands. I don’t want to get in his car again. Just let me out the back door.”

“If he comes back here and you’re not here, then he’s going to be pissed at us. You have to leave the way you came in.”

“What is
wrong
with you?” she demanded.

“So he’s all hands,” said Dennis Jolly. “If he’s not violent, he’s just all hands, you let him drive you home, he cops a few feels, gets some boob, it’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.”

She glanced back through the kitchen. No sign of Kravet.

If she didn’t get out of here soon, she would not be waiting for Tim when he drove up at the end of the alley.

“It’s not nothing,” she repeated.

“When he gets you home, you can cut him off at the knees there, then he’s not pissed at
us
.”

She closed the one step between them, shoved her face close to his, seized him by the belt, and in maybe one second flat, slipped the tip out of the keeper loop—

“Hey!”

—yanked the prong out of the punch hole, and freed the belt from the buckle.

Slapping ineffectively at her hands, he said, “Stop, what the hell you doing, hey!”

He backed off, but she stepped aggressively into him, found the tab on his zipper and yanked his fly open.

“No, hey, hey.”

Linda stayed in his face as he stumbled backward, pressing him along the narrow aisle, clawing at his hand as he tried to close his zipper.

“So what’s the problem?” she demanded, spraying spittle with the
p
in
problem
. “All I want to do is cop a little feel. You shy, Denny? It’s just a little feel. It’s nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing. I’m sure it’ll be a very
little
feel. Are you afraid I won’t even be able to find it, Denny?”

The night manager knocked against a prep table, and a stack of dishes slid to the floor, shattering with the hard clatter of thick cheap china.

Prying at his protecting hand, trying to get in his pants, she said, “Has anyone ever tied it in a knot for you, Denny? You’ll like that. Let me tie it in a knot for you.”

Red-faced, sputtering, frantically back-pedaling, his super-buffed physique working against him—too much bull wedged in the confines of a rodeo corral—he tripped himself and fell.

Resisting the urge to give Mr. Jolly a cheerful kick, Linda stepped between his splayed legs, then over him, and hurried toward the end of the kitchen.

“You crazy bitch!” he shouted in the breaking voice of a squeaky adolescent.

Three doors faced a vestibule, and logic suggested the one in the back wall would be the exit. Instead, beyond lay a refrigerated food locker.

The door to the left revealed a small, cluttered office. The one to the right opened onto a janitorial closet with sink.

Realizing her mistake, she returned to the first door, yanked it open, and entered the food locker, which proved to be a refrigerated receiving room. A door at the farther end gave access to the alley.

A pair of big Dumpsters flanked the back entrance. They didn’t smell as good as the bacon, burgers, and buttered muffins.

Here and there, a caged security light above a door poured a puddle of light on the pavement, but for most of its length, the alleyway funneled through deep shadows and seemed to be a gauntlet of threats.

Rattled by the encounter in the kitchen, she hurried half a dozen steps before she realized that she had gone left instead of right. She turned toward the farther end of the alley.

As she was passing the door to the coffee-shop kitchen, she heard a car pull in from the nearer street, behind her.

Cluttered with Dumpsters, the service passage could accommodate only one vehicle. She stepped out of the way, figuring to let the car pass.

The engine didn’t sound right, riddled with knocks and pings, and the engine wasn’t the worst of it.

She looked back and saw a car with a single headlight, canted to port because one or both of the driver’s-side tires were blown. Shredded rubber flapped, a steel wheel rim rasped on blacktop, the chassis bounced on shot springs, and something—maybe a muffler—dragged on the pavement, spawning flurries of sparks that flew like fireflies from under the vehicle.

In the fall of light from a security lamp, she recognized the white Chevrolet sedan.

How Tim had done this, she didn’t know, but she knew that he had done it. He thought that he had left the Chevy totally disabled, but lame and spavined life remained in the old plug.

Kravet had tumbled to the trick. He knew she had gone out the back of the coffee shop. He had come for her.

As she turned toward the kitchen entrance, Dennis Jolly flung the door open, his thick neck swollen thicker with indignation, tiny jewelry gleaming in his big ear lobes.

If she tried to return to the restaurant, he would block her, and he might even hamper her here with the intention of giving her a piece of his mind.

“If he sees you,” she warned, “he’ll blow your brains out.”

Her tone of voice, Jolly’s high regard for his own skin, and the hellish clatter of the Chevrolet convinced the night manager to retreat an instant after he appeared.

Like the pale horse of the Apocalypse, the sedan roared and lunged, spitting sparks, and Linda ran.