Fiona turned the corner behind them, drove past them in the rental Dodge, and parked two houses beyond the Bledsoe place. They would abandon the van and leave in her car when they had concluded their business.
Two vehicles passed in the street, but neither of them slowed. As far as he could tell, no one thought he and Tilton were sinister.
They could have skulked through backyards, dodging from tree to tree, over fence after fence, but in Drackman’s view, that was riskier than walking straight to the front door. Even at that hour, you never knew who might be looking out a window. If they saw you lurking about and trying to blend with the shadows, they knew you were up to no good. A bold approach appeared less suspicious.
According to Fiona, telephone service in the neighborhood came above ground at the front right corner of each residence. When she got out of her car, not having bothered with a jacket, as wild as the storm itself, she walked directly to the Bledsoe place, lashed by rain and buffeted by a sudden wind that seemed to spring up just to welcome her. At the house, she squatted to find and cut the phone-service line. As Drackman and Tilton climbed the porch steps, Fiona rose, her task completed, and rounded the porch to join them.
As hard as the rain had fallen, it fell now harder still, in thick tropical skeins, and Drackman thanked whatever unknown mystic had devised the Tarot deck as far back as at least the thirteenth century. The Tarot, juju, countless disciplines of magic, fate, the stars, the weight of history, and the power of progress—all were behind his crew this night, and there would be no stopping them.
100
Mr. Smaller, who actually was ten pounds smaller than when he had walked out of the superintendent’s job forever, drove past the apartment building, scanning for stakeout vehicles, pretty sure he would recognize one, keenly suspicious, not to say paranoid, but he didn’t see anything that alarmed him.
He turned left at the corner, left again at the alleyway, and cruised behind the place. Nothing there got his hackles up, either. After parking on a side street a block from the building, he returned to the alley on foot, shoulders hunched, head held low, grumbling to himself about the intensity of the storm that pummeled him and the wind that dashed rain under his hood and into his face.
Before leaving his position as building superintendent, he had made a copy of the passkey that operated every lock in the building, and he had no doubt that it still worked. The swine who owned this empire of tenements and the black-hearted company men who licked their boots and did their vile work for them would have rather slit their wrists than hire a smith to reconfigure every lock in that moldering pile of masonry.
At the rear of the building, at the door to the back stairs, as the key turned smoothly and as he felt the deadbolt retracting from the striker plate in the jamb, Mr. Smaller grinned and said, “Cheap bastards.”
Inside, he closed the door quietly. He stood there dripping and listening. He heard a TV in the distance. Faint. Water racing through the old pipes as someone took a late shower.
The trick now was to get up to the fifth floor unseen, do the deed, waste the sneaky little creep, pull a little Pearl Harbor on him, and then get out without encountering anyone. After the bank and the heist, he was already wanted for murder; it hardly mattered if they hung one more capital charge around his neck. If he was seen by a tenant, however, they would surely recognize him in spite of his shaved head and mustache and weight loss, and then he would have to kill again, just to ensure that he would have time to get out of the city before the police knew he’d been there.
He started up the stairs.
101
In the storage shed at the back of Grandpa Teddy’s property, he sat on a stool in the gloom, holding the door open a few inches, watching the dark house. Sears had done a good job when they erected the shed, and it had served him without problem for years. But right now he would have cursed it if he had been a cursing man, because the rain pounding on the metal roof deafened him, as if he were standing in a giant snare drum inside an even more giant kettle drum.
He’d been on leave from his night gig for a week, ever since Jonah came home, which is why he had told George Yoshioka the fib about every restaurant reservation being sold out, so that the tailor wouldn’t come to see him play and discover he wasn’t there. Grandpa Teddy had begun to think that he might be a fool. Well, every man was a fool—how could it be otherwise in a fallen world?—but Teddy Bledsoe thought he might be an even bigger fool than he had ever previously imagined. He trusted the police, he really did. To a point. To an extent. With some reservations. You didn’t live more than half a century as a black man in this world and be completely trusting of authority. This was his house, his family; and if the police made a mistake, he would suffer the loss. There had been enough losses lately. He didn’t believe he could live through another one and still face the days ahead with his usual enthusiasm. But on this eighth night of his vigil, he thought perhaps the police were wrong when they predicted this Drackman character, given what was now known about his worthless life, would come busting in sooner than later. They had done some psychological profile and swore on it as Grandpa Teddy would have sworn on the Bible in a courtroom. But a profile was a guess—a bunch of guesses, really. It seemed now that every one of those guesses had been wrong.
Well, if after this night he called it quits, at least no one would know that he’d been playing detective or security guard, or whatever it might be that he thought he was doing. He’d left home every evening in his show tux. He?
?d driven to a service station and changed into clothes more suitable for a storage shed and for the rough-and-tumble encounter he anticipated. He’d returned by the weedy vacant lot that backed up to his property, scaled the fence as if he weren’t but a decade away from Social Security, and ducked into the shed to stand guard until it was time for him to change back into his tux and pretend to come home from a session on the bandstand.
Maybe something had gone wrong with his mind. A man could take only so much. When you lost your angel of a wife, when a grandson who should have had the world at his feet suddenly can’t walk on the feet that he has, when all those most precious to you in the world seemed to have their necks through the lunette of a guillotine, a man could be excused for going a little crazy, secretly changing clothes like Clark Kent becoming Superman, sneaking among the trash and trees in a weedy lot, hiding in a shed with a weapon he was loath to use.
He sighed and said softly, “Old man, you’re a musician, you aren’t muscle.”
102
Boy. I woke from a dream, but it seemed to me that the word had not been spoken in the world of sleep, that someone had whispered it in my ear.
I realized that I had left the penlight shining when I’d gone to sleep. The pale beam passed across the bedclothes … just to the right of an object I couldn’t identify, a shadowy roundness at the edge of the light.
Pushing with my left arm, I eased up from the pillow, reaching with my right hand for whatever lay there. I plucked the object off the sheet and knew at once what it was, even before I brought it into the light: the stuffed-toy eye.
“Snoop and liar,” Fiona Cassidy said.
I tried to cry out but couldn’t. My throat was like an organ pipe in which a grab knob had been engaged, cutting off the flow of air and sound.
Looming out of the dark, she switched on my bedside lamp and smiled at me. Neither kindness nor humor informed that smile.
She had cut her hair and dyed it and gotten a deep tan, but I would have recognized her if she’d made twice as many changes to her appearance. The steel edge of the switchblade gleamed in the light.
“Get in your wheelchair, crip.”
When I didn’t at once obey, she slashed the air in front of my face, and I flinched away from the flashing blade.