Live Bait (17 page)

"Sure am. Waddya wanna know, Mr. Bennett?"

"Just one thing. Who gave you the message I should go over to Tony's house last night?"

He looked at me, wide-eyed, and swallowed nervously. "Hey, yeah, I heard that. Somebody iced Tony last night."

"For keeps," I said. "So who told you he'd be sitting home waiting for me?" I watched him, cranking up the silent pressure while he swallowed, dry-mouthed and licked his lips.

"Wasn't nobody. I made that up. Honest." He ran a forefinger around the neckband of his shirt. I grinned at him, the soul of friendliness.

"Why'd you do a thing like that?"

"Jus' friendly," he scrambled. "I din' figure he'd be home an' I thought you'd be better off not seeing 'im."

"If I want somebody to take care of me, I'll put myself up for adoption," I told him. "Now who paid you to send me over there?"

"I'm sorry, Mr. Bennett. I went looking' for him, like. George, the buddy of mine 's knows Tony. He seen you waiting' and he gave me a sawbuck to send you over to Tony's place."

"Then the guy I should be talking to is George." I kept my voice breezy, I wanted him relaxed. "No hard feelings, Bo. I just need to see George. Is he around tonight?"

He licked his lips again. "I haven't seen him tonight, and that's the God's truth."

"So I'll settle for his whole name and a description." I smiled at him, the kind of smile dentists give when they're about to drill. "That shouldn't be hard."

He cleared his throat. "Waddya want with him?"

I sighed. "Listen, don't worry, your name won't come up. You tell me where to find him and I'll go and talk to him and that's it.

He doesn't know where I heard about him, and you're back at the ten dollar window making the big bets."

He did a little move with his shoulders, like a bad middleweight waiting for the bell to start round one. "Well, like he goes by more than one name, OK?"

I nodded. "There's a lot of it going around. What's his other name?"

Now he sniffed, catching his nose a quick swipe with his cuff. "Like, most of the time he goes by Kennie," he said.

I didn't let my excitement show. "What's he look like, this Kennie? Big guy, fat, what?"

Bojangles stopped and looked all around us at the crowds of bettors, none of them paying any attention to a couple of guys standing by a pillar talking form. He slackened his anxiety a hair and said, "He's small, kind of runty. Fair hair an' a whole lot of tattoos on his arms an' that."

It was my Kennie all right but I probed anyway. "Small as a jockey?"

His hand sliced the air carefully at the five-foot-five mark. "No, 'round that high. He's like thirty, been inside once or twice." He looked around again, nervously, then gave me his prime piece of news. "Like, he's mean."

"Then I'll be real careful." I nodded towards the rail where the serious bettors had lined up to watch the race. "Go and watch your horse break, Bo. And don't play games with me any more."

He was like a kid out of school. "This horse won't break. Best trained horse in the race. Won twice in a row, then four no shows. They been savin' him for the stakes race tonight." He nodded and jogged off to the rail, skipping a couple of steps like a six year old.

I'd parked on a side street a couple of blocks from the track and as I walked back to the car a quick shower started, spattering suddenly like a handful of coins flung from an upper window. I ducked into the nearest doorway, a shabby entry to the walkup apartments over a grocery store. I flicked up the collar of my light windbreaker and turned to look out into the rain. Except for a few cars coming and going the street was deserted. But as I waited an old sedan, maybe a sixty-eight, mostly blue but with patches of dull primer paint on the fenders, ducked into the parking spot in front of the doorway. Before I could move the doors burst open and two men jumped out. One was Kennie and the other was Tony's chauffeur and there was no arguing with them; they both had guns pointed at my guts.

 

 

 

Chapter 21

 

 

T
here was no chance to run, they were only eight feet from me, they couldn't miss. Instead I turned and tugged at the door behind me but it was locked. And then it was too late. They were in beside me, both guns rock hard in my ribs. I might have gambled against one, but with two, I stood very still and asked, "So what's with the artillery?"

As I anticipated, Kennie was the rougher. He jammed his gun barrel under my ribs, trying to hook at the rib cage with the foresight. It hurt and I told him softly, "Pull the trigger if you've got to, but don't poke me or I'll stick that thing up your nose." Brave talk but I didn't have a hell of a lot left to lose and I've never liked bullies.

Kennie eased an ounce on the pressure but the other guy said, "Nice and easy, OK. Just walk out to the car like we was all friends, get in the back seat and keep your mouth shut."

"You got it." I was planning as I moved. If I got into the car I could kick back with one foot as I dived through and unfastened the far door. In the confusion I could have ten feet on them both before they could take a shot at me. Odds were they would miss in their excitement and I'd be free.

Both of them were wearing light jackets, Kennie's zippered, the other guy's a regular suitcoat. They drew their guns back from my ribs and held them out of sight under their coats, but I could see where they were pointing. Nothing had changed.

"Now," Kennie said. He moved out, casually, backing away as a friend might from a conversation he hated to leave. He glanced each way, casually, so as not to obstruct the passage of any pedestrian who might be ambling by. None was. He hooked his head at us and the other guy prodded me through his coat. I went ahead of him, past Kennie who was standing at the open rear door, kicked back and hurled myself through to the far side. I was scrabbling for the door handle when Kennie slid into the front seat and stuck his gun barrel against the back of my neck. "Nice try, asshole," he said. "We figured you'd try that."

I drew my feet under me and sat down carefully in the seat behind the passenger side of the car. Kennie knelt back, covering me until the other guy got in, rubbing his ribs. "You're gonna be sorry you done that," he promised.

I already was. If you're going to make a play it's best to have surprise going for you and mine was spent now. They would watch me every second from here on. Now he sat half turned towards me, his gun pointing at me, rock steady. I could see now that it was a smallish automatic, a Beretta I figured, only 32 mm caliber but as lethal as necessary from three feet away.

Slowly Kennie relaxed into the front seat, slipping his own gun into his waistband, on the left side of his pants so he could draw across the body in a moment. He paused to look back over his shoulder. "OK to go?"

"Sure," the other guy said softly. "Nice and easy. Don't run no lights or nothin'. Keep it cool."

"Ten four," Kennie said and chuckled. He started the noisy old motor and pulled out, signaling first as if this was his driving test and I was the guy who could stop his getting a license. I sat back in my seat, noting which way we were headed, eastward up Kingston Road towards Scarborough, and then checked the inside of my door. There was no door handle or ratchet to wind the window down. I was locked in for keeps.

That left me the choice of going with them, on what looked like it was going to be a one-way ride, hoping to find some way to break free as we got out of the car, or else distracting this meaneyed little man next to me. I concentrated all my power into trying to will a police car to come up by us at one of the lights, but none did. Whatever happened from here on was up to me.

Kennie drove out of the city and into Scarborough, the suburb to the east. There are some fancy homes in the borough but the whole Kingston Road ten-mile strip is urban sprawl, gas stations, chicken joints, little plazas and motels. He drove carefully and no police car came in sight. At last we reached the highway that led to the 401.

It's the main artery for the whole of southern Ontario, from the border with Detroit right over to Montreal. I began to wonder if they had a rendezvous set up along the highway—if I was to be transferred to some other car so my disappearance would be total. It would be easy enough to arrange. There's three hundred and fifty miles of the highway between Toronto and Montreal. Much of it follows the lake shore line where there are plenty of places to make a man vanish. All it takes is a bullet in the head and a few minutes to dump the body into one of the swamps along the lake shore, weighted down with an old engine and dropped out of a motorboat. I shuddered and tried to get my head around a plan of escape. Locked in as I was, with that pistol trained on me, I was stuck, until they made me get out of the car. When that happened, I would have to make my move.

Twenty minutes clear of the suburbs, Kennie pulled off, up a major north-south road, Brock Road in Ajax. It's the main access regional road, down to the 401 from the rolling land that the government expropriated in the seventies for an airport that died on the drawing boards, killing the area with it. Now the abandoned farmsteads are falling down. The land is farmed by renters, men who move their machinery about as needed, living elsewhere. It's a favorite spot for lovers, and for people who want to do things quietly. I thought I knew what that meant for me.

I made another try. As Kennie pulled sedately across Highway Two, I glanced to my left, over the head of the guy with the gun and shouted "Watch out!" covering my face as if a car were coming at us through the lights. But he didn't buy it.

"Put your hands on your knees or you're dead," he said softly. So I did it. Then Kennie spoke, over his shoulder like a talkative cabbie. "Don't shoot the bastard yet. I got a better idea."

My watchdog wasn't impressed. "Jus' drive," he said. "I know what we gotta do."

Kennie took us five or six miles north and turned west down a concession road. I was starting to get desperate. If a police car came along these roads once a night it would be a miracle. I was on my own and I had only a few minutes left to live.

A mile or so over he pulled in to the gateway of an abandoned farm. In the headlights I could see that the house and barn were still intact. Then he cut the lights and cruised up behind the house. I braced myself, this was the only chance I would get. If they were sloppy now I might be able to run for it. But they weren't. Kennie stopped and put the handbrake on, then switched on the inside light. He turned around to kneel on the seat, but far back on the edge where he would be able to get a shot off even if I dived at him. He drew his gun and pointed it, grinning the way he had grinned that very first night with the two-by-four in his hand.

"Back out, George. Keep your gun on him, he's slippery." The other guy opened the car door with his left hand and slid out and stood six feet away, gun trained on me. "Now you, bigshot," Kennie said and grinned.

I guessed they planned to shoot me and stuff me in the trunk of the car. My heart was racing but I moved quietly. I had no chance inside the car, perhaps a prayer once I got out. But Kennie robbed me even of that. As I came out of the back door, he came out of the front, smoothly covering me the whole way. Then he surprised me. "In the front seat," he said.

I hesitated but there was no chance to hit him. With both their guns on me, a move would be suicide. I played my luck out down to the wire, hoping for the microsecond's carelessness they hadn't yet shown. And the first crack appeared.

The other man said, "That's not the plan. You know what we're s'posed to do." But Kennie ignored him.

"Get round the other side and open the door," he ordered and George walked around, I could see him shaking his head but Kennie never flinched and the muzzle of that pistol was only four feet away. When George was in place Kennie told me, "OK, now I want you behind the wheel. OK?"

I got in and he said, "Now push your left hand through the steering wheel."

George interrupted without taking his attention off me. "Fer crissakes, Kennie. We're s'posed to ice him and put him in the trunk. You know that."

Kennie cackled. "He'd like that, nice and painless. But him and me go back a ways. I owe him."

I tried for some sympathy. "Listen, Kennie, didn't I stop that punk Willis from beating on you?" It was a long shot but I had no others.

"He wasn't beatin' on me, you turkey," Kennie said impatiently. "He's in this thing with us, right up to his ass."

The words jolted me like a cattle prod, but they hit George even harder. "You dumb bastard!" he shouted. "You got the biggest mouth I ever seen."

"Relax," Kennie assured him. "This guy's a dead man." He crouched so he was looking in at my eye level, his gun trained on my head. "Get in the other side and cover him like this, George, you're gonna like this."

George swore but he did it. I turned my head to tell him "Don't get in any deeper," but he just slammed me in the temple with the barrel of his gun. It was the same side the Chinese kid had hit me the night before and the pain put all my lights out for about twenty seconds. I slumped there in the seat, hearing Kennie laughing, feeling something happening to my hands. Then slowly, as if I was coming up from the bottom of a black pool, I shook my head, making the pain jangle around in a way that woke me to full consciousness.

Kennie was laughing harder. "How's that for size, tough guy?" he asked me and I became aware of my hands, one inside, one outside the steering wheel rim, tied together at the wrist. I tugged but they were tied to stay.

"That's right. You're in good," he jeered. "Can't even get any leverage to snap the steering wheel rim when you start to fry." I glanced around at the other man. He was outside the car crouched where he could look at me. His gun was no longer pointed my way. He was grinning the kind of grin you see on kids who pull the wings off flies. "Now what?" he asked Kennie.

Kennie didn't answer at once. First he stuffed his gun into his belt then he said, "Get the car outa the barn, George, I got me a couple things to do here." And then they both walked away, I could hear them chuckling to one another as I struggled helplessly to free my hands. But it was no use. The cord was tight enough to cut off circulation completely, too strong to be snapped, too restricting to let me grip the rim of the wheel and try to workharden the metal and snap it off. I was stuck tight and my hair prickled as I thought of what he had said. He was going to set fire to the car.