The Weight (30 page)

I went down to the kitchen, but nobody was there. Not in the gym, either. The place was too big for me to go poking around on my own. And even if it wasn’t, if I tried to find Albie’s little book, I’d probably set off a hundred alarms.

So I went back to the kitchen and made myself something to eat. Killed another hour, doing that.

You don’t want to work out right after you have food. Besides, something was gnawing at me, and I couldn’t nail it down. Something about looking around …

That’s when I went back to the place she’d put me in. But I didn’t stay there. I went into the garage. If she was around, I could always say I hoped I’d done the right thing, leaving the keys in the Lincoln last night.

The Lincoln was still there. But not the little car. A Thunderbird, Rena had told me it was. A ’57, like that was real special. All-original, like that was even
more
special. There was only one place in town that she trusted to work on her car. Maybe that’s where she was.

Only, I couldn’t see Rena sitting around while people worked on her car. For all I knew, she’d be back any second. Too many “maybe”s for me.

I broke it down into zones. Safe zones, like you do in prison. You have to learn them for yourself. Prison’s a crazy place, and you better have it mapped if you want to move around and stay alive while you’re doing it.

I figured it was the same way in Albie’s house. The safe zone was from the garage all the way through to the living room or the kitchen. The gym was safe, too.

If you get caught in any place that’s not yours, you always have to have a good reason. In that little suite, I didn’t need to have a reason. Probably that was where they always put guests. But if I was in the kitchen, I’d better be eating. And if I was in the gym, I’d have to be working out.

The living room was no good at all. What would I be doing in there? The place I was staying in had its own TV.

I rechecked my map a few times before I got it. I already had all the cushion I needed. I don’t know how to check for bugs on a telephone, and I wasn’t going to use their phone anyway. I know you can hide those little cameras just about anywhere, but I didn’t care about them, either—what was anyone going to see?

And even if they had cameras, they wouldn’t have an X-ray machine. Nobody could see through the closet doors. And Rena, she had to have been in there herself, to get all those sizes right. Having a good eye, that would never be enough.

But by the time I went out the first time, I was wearing the stuff she’d picked out for me. So she’d already gotten in there, somehow.

With no windows, the place stayed dark all the time. I know there’s cameras that can see in the dark, and I didn’t want to make anyone watching suspicious, so I left the lights on when I opened the closet door.

I went through the clothes, all the new stuff. The closet was big, but I only used one of the two doors to get inside. What I wanted was to feel the wall behind the clothes. Just feel it, not look. I didn’t take a flashlight. Besides, if there was a camera, the light would have given the game away.

The back wall wasn’t wood. Or, if it was, it was covered in soft black stuff, like a layer of foam. I kept going in and out of the closet, every time bringing a different piece of clothing and laying it out on the bed, like I wanted to see how it looked in the light.

It took me a few tries, but I found it. Just a thin cut, but it went all the way down to the floor. Any decent burglar would have run across setups like that plenty of times: a fake wall, with a door behind it. The way this one was rigged, whoever was inside the closet couldn’t use it, only someone on the other side. Probably had a pull-ring, so they could go into the closet, do whatever they wanted, and disappear back out.

A lot of work just to get clothing sizes. She couldn’t know if I was a light sleeper, so she must have been
real
quiet.

For what?

I flopped back on the bed, stared at the ceiling until my eyelids got heavy.

Did Rena want to see if I was smart enough to figure out how she got the clothing sizes? Or did she want to see if I was smart enough not to mention it if I did?

The only thing I knew for sure was that whoever built that setup, they hadn’t built it for me. I wasn’t the first person to be in that suite. Maybe, for the others, it wasn’t clothing sizes they wanted to check.

It had to be “they,” because Rena knew about the deal before she put me in there. And the idea for it felt like something Albie would do—if he was that much like Solly.

Maybe there was something I should be doing, but I couldn’t dope out what that might be. Fucking Solly. Go down there and nose around, huh? I haven’t been that many places, but I didn’t see why one place would be that different from another.
Somewhere
in this town, there had to be a joint where guys like me would go if they were looking for work—like a union hall for outlaws.

I don’t mean a trouble bar, or a biker hangout. It would be a pretty quiet place. And they’d
keep
it quiet. The cops might know about it, but they could never put an undercover in there. I mean, he could walk in, all right—nobody was going to eighty-six him or fix him a Mickey Finn. But the place would go from quiet to dead silence, like the undercover had a neon sign over his head:
COP
.

A place like that, you have to come in the first couple of times
with
someone. And not just anyone. Not one of those “around guys”; it would have to be someone who was already in. And they’d do all the talking.

Someone says to you, “This guy, he’s a pal of mine,” that’s one thing. But if he says, “Remember the time you and me …” you get up and walk away before he finishes the sentence.

So I was screwed. Even if there was places like that in Tallahassee, I couldn’t walk in cold.

And this business of leaving my number around, that was bullshit, too. Like this Jessop was going to call me, right? Sure, whoever
gave him a message would tell him what I looked like, and that would fit. But this Jessop, he knew me. That means he’d also know I’m not a guy who puts jobs together. So I’d come off as either a rat or a fool who wanted to talk him into some freelance work. Or even a guy who wanted more than his share.

Jessop, he’d just get in the wind.

That’s when it hit me. I could make a call of my own. It wasn’t even that late. If the lawyer wasn’t in court, he’d be in his office.

I moved quick. Had the Lincoln back out of the garage and onto some road a few miles away in just a couple of minutes.

The parking lot of the Time Saver store wasn’t full. I walked away from the car, in case it had some kind of wire on it. Then I called the lawyer.

It took another few minutes for that girl to put me through. All that control stuff she had going, she was going to end up costing the lawyer more than money. But I figured he knew that.

Turned out he knew a lot. “Let us be clear: this is an attorney-client conversation, in which I am reporting facts gathered by a person I employed to the person who employed me. That would be you.”

“Sure. That’s right.”

“Abner Jessop,” the lawyer said. “Would a DOB of 1961 work?”

“I guess so.”

“Six-four, one seventy-five?”

“Perfect, so far.”

“Priors back to ’79. Convicted of armed robbery, served eight years at Raiford.”

“That’s in Florida?”

“It is,” he said, like I should just shut up and listen. “Married in ’89 to one Lily Lee Macomb. Age listed as twenty-eight for him, fourteen for her.”

“How can you get—?”

“Parental consent,” he cut me off, like it was my second strike. “He’s got three children, none of them by the … woman he married.”

“So he’d be paying child—”

“In arrears, all three. State took his driver’s license in ’02. Restored it in ’06, when he got all caught up.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Prominent scar, left forearm. Confederate-flag tattoo over left pectoral.”

“That’s him.”

“Good. Two assault raps: one in ’91, the other in ’96. The first was tossed; complainant withdrew. The other, he used a knife. Six years in on that one.”

“So he would have been out on—”

“On parole, yes,” the lawyer said, cutting me off in case I was dumb enough to say a date. I’m glad he did, because that’s what I
was
going to say. “In fact, he still is.”

All finished, so he waited for me to say something stupid. When I didn’t, he gave me an address. It would be the same one his parole officer had, so it was probably just a drop, but it was a ton more than I expected.

“Thank you” is all I said.

The lawyer hung up without asking for more money, so I knew we were done.

When I got back, the Thunderbird was still missing. In my place, the clock said 4:54 with a half-moon. I changed into sweats, got a couple of bottles of water out of the refrigerator, and went to the gym.

Like always, when I work out
hard
, I get to a place where my mind is burning same as my body. Usually happens when I keep going even after I’m empty.

But the only thing I came out of that workout with was this: Rena was smarter than me. I wasn’t going to be able to trick her into anything.

I might
make
her tell me something, but I don’t have what it takes to do that. I mean, I could smack somebody around, scare the hell out of them, but for-real torture, the kind of guys who can do
that, you don’t want to be around them. I don’t even understand how they can be around themselves.

I remember talking to one of them once. He told me, the worst thing in the world is when you have to go all the way, because the other guy’s not giving it up. And then, after all that work, you find out later that he never knew in the first place.

Just listening to that guy made me feel like a fucking pervert.

Rena already said she knew where Albie’s books were. But she said “work books,” not “books.” And she didn’t say “stamp books,” either. Maybe she didn’t even know there
was
a book like Solly’s, never mind where it was.

But I was just making excuses. When I told that cop, Woods, that if I found the guy who had really raped that girl I’d
get
him to tell me everything, I wasn’t lying. But only if he didn’t hold out too long. I never said that last part, because I wanted the cop to believe I’d do anything to get him the information
he
wanted. The truth is, I was going to skip all the stuff in the middle. If a broken arm or shattered kneecap would make him talk, great. But I wasn’t going past that. I’d just jump right over to where I wanted to be in the first place—killing him.

I wished there was somebody I could talk to about that. Not about my feelings or anything, but how I could do it. Get that Rena to tell me whatever she knew, so I could go back and try to find the man Solly wanted dead.

I wondered why I’d never brought that up to Solly.

I was still thinking that over when the girl walked in.

“You really love this place, huh?”

“Who wouldn’t? It’s the best setup I ever saw in my life.”