The Key to Midnight (13 page)

Although Blakenship hadn’t mentioned the courier in the fax that he had sent yesterday, Kennedy was no doubt the man.

The bellman said, “The ambulance crew wants to take Mr. Kennedy to the hospital, but every time they get close to him, he kicks and punches and tries to bite them.”

Because they were speaking Japanese and because the bellman was speaking very fast, Alex thought he had misunderstood. “Kicking and punching, you said?”

“Yes, sir. He refuses to let anyone touch him or take him away until he talks to you. The police don’t want to handle him because they’re afraid of aggravating his injuries.”

They hurried to the elevator alcove. Another bellman was holding open the doors at one of the elevators.

On the way down, Alex said, “Did you see it happen?”

“Yes, sir,” said the first bellman. “Mr. Kennedy got out of the taxi, and a car angled through the traffic, jumped the curb, hit him.”

“Do they have the driver?”

“He got away.”

“Didn’t stop?”

“No, sir,” the bellman said, clearly embarrassed that any Japanese citizen could behave so lawlessly.

“What’s Mr. Kennedy’s condition?”

“It’s his leg,” said the bellman uneasily.

“Broken?” Alex asked.

“There’s a lot of blood.”

The hotel lobby was nearly deserted. Everyone except the desk clerks was at the scene of the accident in the street.

Alex pushed through the crowd and saw Wayne Kennedy sitting on the sidewalk with his back against the building, flanked by two blood-smeared and badly battered suitcases. The wide-eyed onlookers kept a respectful distance on three sides of him, as if he were a wild animal that no one dared approach. He was shouting furiously at a uniformed ambulance attendant who had ventured within six or seven feet of him.

Kennedy was an impressive sight: a handsome black man, about thirty years old, six foot five, two hundred forty pounds, with fierce dark eyes. Cursing at the top of his voice, shaking one huge fist at the paramedics, he looked as if he might be constructed of concrete, iron, two-by-fours, and railroad ties, and in spite of his incapacity, he didn’t seem to be an ordinary mortal man.

When Alex glimpsed the courier’s injuries, he was stunned and doubly impressed by all the shrieking, fist-shaking bravado. The leg wasn’t merely broken: It was crushed.

Splinters of bone had pierced the flesh and the blood-soaked trousers.

“Thank God you’re here,” Kennedy said as Alex knelt beside him.

The courier slumped against the wall as if someone had cut a set of supporting wires. He seemed to grow smaller, and the maniacal energy that had sustained him suddenly vanished. He was streaming sweat, shivering violently, in tremendous pain. It was amazing that he had summoned sufficient strength to hold everyone off for nearly a quarter of an hour.

“Have you really punched at the medics?” Alex asked.

“The bastards don’t speak English!” Kennedy said, as if Chicagoans faced with an injured tourist from Kyoto would have held forth in fluent Japanese. “Jesus, what I had to go through to find someone ... who could understand me. I couldn’t let them cart me off until I’d delivered ... the file.” He indicated one of the suitcases at his side.

“Good God, man, the file isn’t that important.”

“It must be,” Kennedy said shakily. “Someone tried ... to kill me for it. This wasn’t an accident.”

“How do you know that?”

“Saw the stinking sonofabitch coming.” Kennedy grimaced with pain. “A red Toyota.”

Alex remembered the car that had followed his taxi from the Moonglow Lounge earlier that same morning.

“I stepped... out of the way ... but he turned straight toward me.”

When Alex signaled the waiting paramedics, two men rushed in with a stretcher.

“Two guys ... in the Toyota,” Kennedy said.

“Save your strength. You can tell me about it later.”

“I’d rather ... talk now,” Kennedy said as the paramedics cut open his pants leg to examine his injury and to stabilize the broken bones with an inflatable splint before moving him. “Takes my mind off ... the pain. The Toyota hit me ... knocked me into the wall ... ass over teakettle... pinned me there ... then backed off. The guy on the passenger side got out ... grabbed for the suitcase. We played... tug of war. Then I bit his hand ... hard. He gave up.”

Alex had been warned to expect a message. This was it.

With considerable effort—and a little lingering wariness—the paramedics lifted Wayne Kennedy onto the wheeled stretcher.

The courier howled as he was moved. Tears of pain streamed down his face.

The wheeled legs of the gurney folded under it as it was shoved into the van-style ambulance.

Alex picked up both suitcases and followed Kennedy. No one tried to stop him. In the van, he sat on the suitcases.

The rear doors slammed shut. One of the paramedics remained with Kennedy and began to prepare a bottle of plasma for intravenous transfusion.

The ambulance began to move, and the siren wailed.

Without raising his head from the stretcher, Wayne Kennedy said, “You still there, boss?”

“Right here,” Alex assured him.

Kennedy’s voice was twisted with pain, but he wouldn’t be quiet. “You think I’m an idiot?”

Alex stared at the hideously crumpled leg. “Wayne, for God’s sake, you were sitting there bleeding to death.”

“If you’d been in my shoes ... you’d have done the same.”

“Not in a million years.”

“Oh, yeah. You would’ve. I know you,” Kennedy insisted. “You hate to lose.”

The paramedic cut away the coat and shirt sleeves on Kennedy’s left arm. He swabbed the ebony skin with an alcohol-damp sterile pad, then quickly placed the needle in the vein.

Kennedy’s bad leg twitched. He groaned and said, “I’ve got something to say ... Mr. Hunter. But maybe I shouldn’t.”

“Say it before you choke on it,” Alex told him. “Then please shut the hell up before you talk yourself to death.”

The ambulance turned the corner so sharply that Alex had to grab at the safety railing beside him to keep from sliding off the pair of suitcases.

Kennedy said, “You and me ... we’re an awful lot alike in some ways. I mean ... like you started out with nothing... and so did I. You were damned determined to make it ... to the top ... and you did. I’m determined... to make it ... and I will. We’re both smooth on the surface and street fighters underneath.”

Alex wondered if the courier was delirious. “I know all that, Wayne. Why do you think I hired you? 1 knew you’d be the same kind of field op that I was when I started.”

Grinding the words out between clenched teeth, Kennedy said, “So I’d like to suggest... when you get back to the States ... you’ve got to make a decision about filling Bob Feldman’s job. Don’t forget me.”

Bob Feldman was in charge of the company’s entire force of field operatives, and he was retiring in two months.

“I get things done,” Kennedy said. “I’m right ... for the job ... Mr. Hunter.”

Alex shook his head in amazement. “I can almost believe you traveled around the world and arranged to be hit by that car just to trap me in here for this sales pitch.”

“Bob Feldman ... retiring ... keep me in mind,” Kennedy said, his speech beginning to slur.

“I’ll do better than that. I’ll give you the job.”

Kennedy tried to raise his head but couldn’t manage to do so. “You... mean it?”

“I said it, didn’t I?”

“Every cloud,” Kennedy said, “has a silver lining,” and at last he relinquished his tenuous grip on consciousness.

After Wayne Kennedy was taken into surgery, Alex used a hospital pay phone to call Joanna.

Mariko answered. “She’s still asleep, Alex-san.”

He told her what had happened. “So I’m going to stay here until Wayne comes out of surgery and the doctors can tell me whether the leg stays or goes.”

“It’s that bad?”

“Yes. So I won’t be able to get there by one o’clock, like I promised Joanna.”

“You belong with your friend. She’ll understand.”

“I don’t want her to think I’m backing out.”

“She knows you better than that.”

“Does Joanna have a spare bedroom?”

“For your Mr. Kennedy?”

“No. He’ll be staying here. The room would be for me. Neither you nor Joanna should be alone until this is finished. Besides, it’s better strategy to work out of one place. Saves time. I’d like to check out of the hotel and move in there—if it won’t ruin anyone’s reputation.”

“I’ll prepare the spare room, Alex-san.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can. Keep the doors locked. And Mariko ... we aren’t quitting until we know what was done to Joanna and why.”

“Good,” Mariko said.

“We’re going to nail these bastards to the barn wall.”

“Nail them to a barn wall? Whatever that means exactly, I think it will be most excellent,” Mariko agreed.

Alex was far more energized than he’d been in years. Until this moment, he hadn’t fully realized that all his financial success had to some degree dampened the fire in him. His fortune, his twenty-two-room estate, and his pair of Rolls-Royces had mellowed him. But now, once again, he was a driven man.

The hanging bridge
Creeping vines

Entwine our life.

 
—BASHO, 1644-1694

At six o’clock the chief surgeon, Dr. Ito, came to the hospital waiting room where Alex was pacing. The doctor was a thin, elegant man in his fifties. He had been working on Wayne Kennedy for five hours. He looked tired, but he smiled because he had good news: Amputation would not be necessary. Kennedy was not entirely out of danger; all manner of complications could yet arise. More likely than not, even without complications, he would have a pronounced limp for the rest of his life, but at least he’d walk on his own two legs.

Dr. Ito was leaving the lounge when Mariko Inamura arrived to take over the vigil from Alex and free him to move his belongings from the hotel to the spare bedroom above the Moonglow Lounge. When Wayne Kennedy came out of anesthesia, he would need to see a friendly face other than those of the nurses and physicians, and he would want someone close by who spoke fluent English. Dr. Mifuni was staying with Joanna until Alex could get to the Moonglow.

Alex led Mariko to a corner of the waiting room. They sat on a yellow leatherette couch and spoke in whispers.

“The police will want to talk to Wayne,” Alex told her.

“Tonight? The way he is?”

“Probably not until tomorrow when he’s got his wits about him. So when he wakes up and you’re certain he understands what you’re saying, tell him that I want him to cooperate with the police—”

“Of course.”

“—but only to a point.”

Mariko frowned.

“He should give them a description of the car and the men in it,” Alex said, “but he shouldn’t tell them about the file he was carrying from Chicago. He’ll have to pretend he’s just an ordinary tourist. He hasn’t any idea why they were trying to steal his suitcase. Nothing in it but shirts and underwear. Got that?”

Mariko’s traditional Japanese upbringing had instilled in her a respect for authority that was as much a part of her as grain is a part of wood. “But wouldn’t it be better to tell the police everything and have them working for us? They have the facilities, the manpower—”

“If Joanna is really Lisa Chelgrin, do you think her forged passport and phony identification are so convincing that no one’s ever doubted them? Not for a minute? No one?”

“Well, I don’t know, but—”

“Japan is insular. It doesn’t welcome non-Japanese immigrants with open arms. Yet the authorities have allowed this woman to take up residence and open a business, evidently with no serious check of her background.”

“You’re saying this is some big international conspiracy? That the Japanese government might be involved? Alex-san, excuse me, but isn’t this paranoid?”

“Joanna... Lisa isn’t just an ordinary missing person. This is a damned strange situation. We’re dealing with the daughter of a United States Senator. We don’t know what political forces and interests are at work in this.”

“In Japan the police are—”

“Do you want to take chances with Joanna’s life?”

“No. But ...

“Trust me.”

She hesitated. “All right.”

Alex got to his feet. “I’ve arranged a private room for Wayne. You’d better go up there now. They’ll be transferring him from the recovery room in a few minutes.”

“Is it safe for you to leave here alone?” Mariko asked.

He picked up the suitcase that contained the Chelgrin file, having left the other bag in Wayne’s room. “They think they’ve scared me off. For a while they’ll be lying low, just watching.”

Outside the hospital, the night was cold, but the snow flurries had long ago stopped. Backlighted by the moon, fast-moving trains of clouds tracked west to east.

Alex took a taxicab to the hotel, packed his bags, and checked out of his suite. From the hospital to the hotel, then from the hotel to the Moonglow Lounge, he was followed by two men in a white Honda.

By seven-thirty at Joanna’s place, he had unpacked. The spare bedroom was cozy, with a low, slanted ceiling and a pair of dormer windows.

Shortly before Dr. Mifuni left, Joanna went into the kitchen to check on dinner, and the physician took advantage of her absence to draw Alex aside and speak with him. “Once or twice a night, you should look in on her to be certain she’s only sleeping.”

“You don’t think she’d try it again?”

“No, no,” Mifuni said. “There’s virtually no chance. What she did last night was strictly impulsive, and she’s not really impulsive by nature. Nevertheless ...”