“I’m here, okay? I’m here.”
They weren’t going into the Bledsoe house until eleven o’clock. Drackman glanced at his watch. Going to be a long evening.
98
After Malcolm went home, Mrs. Lorenzo wanted to talk over a cup of coffee at the kitchen table, so I had a cup, too. She was happy to be living with us, and she didn’t get teary every time she mentioned her husband, so I thought she must be healing from that loss. But she had been alone for a year during which she’d had a lot of time to think. I suppose there were thoughts she’d had when all by herself that she wanted to share with someone.
Over coffee, she told me that the four things she loved most, loved with all her heart and soul, were her father, her husband, God, and food. Her father died young. So did her husband. She still loved God, she said, in spite of His habit of taking from her the people she loved with all her heart. The problem was that no matter how much she loved God, He remained invisible, and the only way she knew how much He loved her was to read scripture, which could be hard going. Meanwhile, the love that she brought to her cooking was returned to her daily by the flavor of what she put on her plate.
She was well aware that gluttony was a deadly sin, but there were three reasons why she didn’t worry about that. First, the formal definition of gluttony was eating and drinking to excess, but Mrs. Lorenzo didn’t drink. Second, before eating her meals all by herself back in the apartment, she always said grace, thanking the Lord for His bounty. Therefore it seemed to her that if the Lord disapproved of the size of the portions she ate, He would make her even poorer, so that she couldn’t afford so much food. Or He would reclaim from her the culinary genius that was her gift, so that what she cooked didn’t taste worth eating. Third, she kept a list of what she ate, soberly considered what might be excessive, and at the end of the week read every item during her confession and received absolution. “Whatever weight I put on, Jonah, is sanctified fat.”
“I sure wish I could get some sanctified fat,” I said. “I’m still a stick.”
“If I cook long enough for you, child, you’ll be a regular Godfrey Cambridge.”
He was a terrific comedian and actor back then, a bit on the hefty side. I might have given up music to be as funny as Godfrey Cambridge.
Anyway, after a while, Mrs. Lorenzo decided to go upstairs and read in bed, either scripture or recipes, she couldn’t decide which. She checked the locks on all the doors and windows before leaving me alone on the first floor.
After I brushed my teeth and completed my other bathroom business, I put on my pajama top and wrestled my uncooperative legs into pajama pants. I sat up in bed for a while, reading about Tin Pan Alley: the legendary Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton; Jerome Kern; George Gershwin, who started out by writing a song for Sophie Tucker to sing and went on to become the greatest composer of the century.
All of it was interesting and inspiring, but I couldn’t see myself in anyone I read about. Nevertheless, I intended to keep reading a thousand such books, if I had to, until I figured out how they did what they did.
At ten o’clock, I took the penlight from the nightstand drawer and switched off the lamp. Lying in the dark, I listened to the storm for a while, and it bothered me that the drumming of the rain masked all other sounds.
Eventually I clicked the penlight and swept the room with the narrow beam. I discovered no zombies or emotionless seed-pod people from outer space, no monsters of any kind. I decided to leave the penlight on for a few minutes.
99
Earlier in the day, using her second set of false ID, Fiona had rented another car, a Chevrolet, and parked it at the motel. Before leaving Room 14, at Lucas’s direction, she gave the keys to Mr. Smaller and said, “Don’t make it too easy for the sneaky bastard. We’re in this soup because of him.”
“You sure maybe they ain’t
watchin’ him, too?”
“If they are, they’re invisible.”
Mr. Smaller departed in the Chevy. Drackman and Tilton drove away in the paneled van, and Fiona followed in the Dodge that she had rented when she’d first returned from their farmhouse hideaway.
The metropolis glistened in the storm, all silver and black, headlamp beams wriggling like bright snakes across the streaming streets, every bulb and tube of light reflected in one or more wet surfaces, and yet Drackman thought the city appeared darker than usual, cloaked and riddled with mystery. Perhaps because the oily blacktop contrasted so starkly with the reflected lights, it looked blacker than on other nights, blacker than black. There were vistas, scenes, moments when the buildings and bridges, all of it, seemed like an illusion projected on the screen of rain, nothing really there except the rain-captured light and a fearsome void beyond it, an abyss below. It spoke to him, this trembling city of ephemeral light and the darkness underlying it, and he felt at home.
When Drackman turned the corner onto the Bledsoes’ street, the surveillance van, identical to the one he drove, stood at the curb where he had been told it would be. Police stakeouts often involved three shifts, eight hours each, but just as often, as in this case, they ran it in two twelve-hour shifts, maybe because it allowed the cops to pile up overtime hours at double their usual pay, maybe because at the moment the department was understaffed. Twelve-hour shifts, day after day, were a big mistake. The detectives grew bored, tired, less than fully observant, slow to react, and if they returned for duty every twelve hours, the effects were cumulative.
Fiona had observed that the shift changes came at four o’clock in the morning and four in the afternoon. When Drackman pulled to a stop behind the first van, almost five hours early, the detectives on duty had to be thinking either that some dink at HQ had altered the shift-change time without telling them or that a clueless dispatcher had sent these newcomers to the wrong stakeout … or that bad actors had entered the picture.
That last possibility, if the cops jumped to it quickly enough, could mean trouble for Drackman. Boldness was the hallmark of his style, however, and now he pulled up the hood of his jacket, got out of the van, and hurried forward through the driving rain, intent on giving them little time to think.
No traffic on the street just now. Everyone preferring home and hearth in the storm. Perfect.
He didn’t know if the new-shift guys had a way of talking to the old-shift guys, van to van, by radio or walkie-talkie. He didn’t have a radio or a walkie-talkie, and he didn’t want to talk to them, anyway, because his cover would be blown the moment he said the wrong thing or didn’t say the right thing.
He had a badge, a shield, a real one, a heavy chunk of gold-plated bronze that he’d taken off a detective he’d killed eighteen months earlier. When he reached the driver’s door of the stakeout van, he bent down and, with his left hand, held the shield to the window. The tinted glass offered a clear view from inside but not much from outside. He could see a shape, a paleness of face, the guy in there checking out the shield, seeing it was real, but it could go badly wrong at any moment.
The driver began to crank down the window, a good sign, and now the big question was, Both guys in front or one in front and one in the back? They were running a two-man stakeout for maybe a couple of weeks, and nothing to show for it. So one guy might be napping in back, although it was a violation of department policy, or maybe he was back there taking a leak in a bottle, whatever. The window came down far enough that Drackman saw two in front, the ideal situation, because in his right hand he had a pistol fitted with a state-of-the-art sound suppressor. As the cop lowering the window started to say something, raising his voice above the incessant rain, Lucas Drackman pumped six rounds into the interior of the van, aiming down to spare the windows. A shattered window would be as revealing as a scream to anyone who might drive by.
He knew the driver was dead, but he couldn’t be certain of the cop in the farther seat. He opened the door, and the ceiling light came on, and the moment he saw the passenger’s broken face, he knew he’d gotten them both.
After rolling up the window, he closed the door and waved at the van he’d been driving. The hood of his jacket raised, reminiscent of a monk in a movie Drackman had once seen, Tilton came toward him, carrying the little kit that contained the glass-cutter, the suction cup to keep the cut piece from falling into the house, and several other burglary tools that they might need.