“Thanks a lot.”
“And so far as the security arrangements are concerned, it looks to me as if Sergeant Carter has things well in hand,” Wohl said.
Why am I uneasy saying that?
“What about when Payne leaves the hospital?”
“We’re working on that. Question one, to be answered, is when he will be leaving. We can talk about that in the morning.”
Why didn’t I just say we’re going to have Lewis, McFadden, and Martinez sit on him?
Wohl put his hand on Pekach’s arm and led him to Matt Payne’s door.
EIGHTEEN
“I’m sorry, we have no patient by that name,” the hospital operator said.
“But I know he’s there,” Helene Stillwell said snappishly. “I visited him this morning.”
“One moment, please,” the operator said.
“Damn!” Helene said.
A male voice came on the line: “May I help you, ma’am?”
Helene hung up.
They’re monitoring his calls. Obviously. After that threat to—what did it say?
She dropped her eyes to the Ledger, which she had laid on the marble top of the bar in the sun room, and found what she was looking for. It was in a front-page story with the headline ISLAMIC LIBERATION ARMY THREATENS REVENGE FOR POLICE SHOOTING.
“Death to the Zionist oppressors of our people and the murderers who call themselves police!” she read aloud. “My God!”
Under the headline was a photograph of Matt and Mayor Jerry Carlucci, with the caption “Officer M. M. Payne, of Special Operations, apparently the target of the ILA threat, shown with Mayor Jerome Carlucci three months ago, shortly after Payne shot to death Germantown resident Warren K. Fletcher, allegedly the ‘North Philadelphia serial rapist.’”
Looking at Matt’s face, she had a sudden very clear mental image of his gun, and the slick, menacing cartridges for it, which was then replaced by the memory of his naked body next to hers, and of him and the eruption, the explosion, in her, which had followed.
“Christ!” she said softly, and reached for the cognac snifter on the marble.
There was the clunking noise the garage door always made the moment the mechanism was triggered. When she looked out the glass wall at the end of the sun room, she saw Farny’s Lincoln coupe waiting for the garage door to open fully.
I didn’t see him come up the drive, she thought, and then: I wonder what he’s doing home so early.
Helene went behind the bar, intending to give the cognac snifter a quick rinse and to put the bottle away. But then she changed her mind, splashed more Rémy Martin in the glass and drank it all down at a gulp. Then she rinsed the glass and put the Rémy Martin bottle back on the shelf beneath the bar.
Before Farny came into the house, there was time for her to fish in her purse for a spray bottle of breath sweetener, to use it, replace it, and then move purse and newspaper to the glass-topped coffee table. She had seated herself on the couch and found and lit a cigarette by the time she heard the kitchen door open and then slam.
He always slams that goddamn door!
“I’m in here,” she called.
He didn’t respond. She heard the sound of his opening the cloak closet under the stairs, the rattling of hangers, and then the clunk of the door closing.
He appeared in the entrance to the sun room.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hi,” Helene said. “I didn’t expect you until later.”