The Erection Set (43 page)

“At ease, doll. I'm all right.” I pusher her away and tilted her head up with the palm of my hand. “A war's made up of battles, kid. I just won this one.”

She let out a short laugh and wiped the tears out of her eyes. “And I don't suppose I get to know what happened, do I?”

“You suppose right.” I pulled the door shut, locked it and checked to make sure the Venetian blinds were all shuttered tight. “You run down anything at all?”

“All I should tell you is up your bucket,” she said.

“What about those Social Security cards?”

“Nothing.” Sharon hooked her arm under mine and led me to the desk. “I doubled back on everybody they hired through Cable and not one thing looked phony. I'm no detective, but I know how to run personnel and everybody here is as square as a pair of Los Vegas dice.”

The disappointment went through me like liquid tar and she sensed it. There was only that black, sticky feeling that kept you from going any place at all, holding you right in the target area like a staked-out goat waiting for the tiger to come get him.

“But I got another idea,” she said.

I was so damned disgusted I almost didn't hear her. It finally sunk in and I turned my head to look at her.

“The factory is hiring too. I got the girl in their department to let me look at their records because I said we might need some character types in a hurry. There wasn't much time so I only ran down those who were around the sixtyfive-year-old mark. Barrin doesn't hire over that age. Took a lot of phone calls to cross-check their identities, but I came up with three nobody could vouch for at all. Each had given local businesses as references, but two of those places said they had never worked there and the third one gave a business that didn't even exist at all.”

“What business was that?”

She told me and the black, sticky feeling went away. “You have his address?”

Sharon picked up a card and handed it to me. “Nine-o-one Sherman. Know where it is?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know where it is.”

“And don't tell me I can't go with you.”

“No ... I won't tell you that. You earned that much.”

She stepped back and gave me a slant-eyed look. “You're agreeing a little too easily. I don't like that.”

I could feel the tiredness in my voice. “It'll make you a perfect escape clause, kitten.”

“What?”

“Never mind. You'll see what I mean.”

Nobody answered. I pushed the button again. I tried the third time and was reaching for the doorknob when a voice came out of the blackness at one end of the porch and said, “What took you so long, Dog?”

“Ferris,” I murmured softly. “You haven't got a very elaborate factory here, friend.”

“But the product is highly refined, easily packaged, the demand enormous and the profit tremendous. Shall we go inside?”

He was old now, but the years had touched him lightly. If he shuffled in an elderly manner it was an artificial gesture and when he knew I realized it he smiled and let the cat in him take over. His hair was thin and gray, his clothes baggy and worn, but there was a muscular lankiness to his body that meant old habits didn't die easily and he had kept himself in shape even though it wasn't necessary any longer.

When I introduced Sharon he rubbed the back of his neck while he said hello, the old signal that meant he had to be satisfied with her status before he'd go any further. If I was in a squeeze and she was part of it, he was ready to pull the trigger on his own booby trap and he was alerting me to be ready to cut and run out of the line of fire.

I said,
“Bravo,
buddy,” remembering the answer signal and watched him relax. “She's part of my new team now,” I explained.

“Sure,” he told me. “Times have changed, but they really don't change at all. What's that French saying?”

“The more things change the more they remain the same,” I said. “I thought you'd be dead by now, Ferris.”

“Only the excitement died. I woke up one morning and decided the world was worth neither saving nor destroying. Even fine hatreds and the sheer love of pleasure become boring under the monotonous onslaught of time.”

“Then why come back?”

Ferris eased himself down into a chair and when he leaned back the worn tweed jacket hiked up a little bit over the bulge of the guns he wore on either side of his hip.
A matched pair of German 9 mm. P-38s,
I remembered.

“A couple of reasons,” he answered, his brown berrylike eyes looking at me closely. “First, I owed you one for taking that bullet instead of me on that last job in Berlin. The second was sheer curiosity. I wanted to see how an old retired pro would react when the big one was dumped in his lap.”

“Don't shit me, Ferris.” There was a cold snap in my voice I couldn't help.

He nodded, the berry eyes laughing at me. “You're still sharp, boy. You shouldn't have retired. Yep, there's another reason. The world is polluting itself to death. You can treat sewage, cap chimneys and go back to returnable bottles, but nobody stops the kind of pollution we were a part of. I thought maybe you could give it a try.”

“When did you get interested in ecology?”

“The day a young man I knew and trained told me he was escorting a multimillion-dollar shipment of H to the States and smelled an intercept. We arranged a switch, but he wasn't careful enough and got himself killed in a restaurant in Marseilles.”

“And I got tagged for the job.”

“You were a natural for it; boy. I gave it all your earmarks, but since you got the name, I decided to give you the game and let you take it from there. I'm too damn old for the fun and games and money doesn't mean a thing to me anymore. You're still young enough to enjoy it all.” He glanced at Sharon, still smiling with his eyes. “Unless you're
really
retired.”

I could have shot the old bastard right then and there, but there still was some fun left in it and my face creased into a tight grin. “I'm retired, but let's say I'm called back for a consultation. Just one other thing ... how'd you find me?”

“You never bothered covering your tracks, son. Pretty stupid, wasn't it?”

“I never bothered thinking about it.”

“You sure screwed everybody else up, though. The vultures took a while to locate you.” He let out a little chuckle. “Some job you did on Bridey-the-Greek and Markham.”

“I didn't kill them.”

He chuckled again, his fingers rapping against the arm of the chair. “I know, but the others were all yours, weren't they?”

They was no use answering him. He knew the answers.

“Who's left, Dog?” He knew that answer too, but he wanted me to say it.

“Arnold Bell,” I told him.

“And he's new, Dog. I hear tell he's even better than you were at your very best. He was paid in advance and is one of those crazy people who are dedicated to their jobs. You're his biggest challenge and after he kills you he'll be the king in his business. There will be other Turks and other Le Fleurs and they'll always be needing Arnold Bell to keep the raiders out of their empires. They laid everything on the line to have you wiped out because you are the biggest threat of them all. As long as you are alive they can never exist in security and safety. So the biggest gun of all comes out and the advantage is all his.”

“You think he can nail me?” I asked him.

“Certainly. You know the mortality rate in this business. It's always the ones on the way up who knock off the ones on the way out.”

“Then why bother setting me up?”

“An old man needs a glimpse of the past to refresh his memories, occasionally. At my age, that's all you have to live on. I'm just sorry I won't be there to see it happen. It should be a bloody mess. Maybe if you had run me down a little sooner I would have called the odds pretty even, but you've slowed up, buddy. The reflexes are still there, but the old computer doesn't send the messages out fast enough. They put old dogs to sleep, son. You're ready for the pound.”

“Can I have one last bark?” I asked him.

Ferris nodded. “Maybe even a growl.”

“Thanks a bunch. Where's the stuff?”

“In an old panel truck out back. Don't bother asking me how I got it through or how I'm going to get back. One day they can read it all in my memoirs.” He reached in his pocket, took out an ignition key and tossed it to me. “Like you used to say, it's your ball now, kid.”

It nested in the shadows of the building, an old Dodge panel job with crumpled fenders and doors you had to wrench open. A tattered army blanket covered the holes in the seat cushions and there was no window on the driver's side. The ignition key unlocked the doors in the back and when I swung them open the sealed walnut coffin gave off a dull sheen in the light of my match. Sharon sucked in her breath with an audible gasp, her hands clasped tight around my arm. I pushed her loose, climbed inside and broke the seal on the lid. Her face was a pale white oval with brighter spots where her eyes were, watching me look in the satin-padded box.

“Dog .. Her voice was barely a whisper.

“The biggest corpse in the world, baby. There's enough heroin here to overdose every addict in New York.” I shut the lid and climbed out of the truck.

“Dog .. she said again. “Heroin?”

“Big H.”

“Yours?”

“All mine. Bundles of millions of dollars and it's all mine.”

I didn't have to see her face to know the disgust was there. The loathing was there too when she asked, “What are you going to do with it?”

“Sell it, kid,” I told her.

This time she didn't touch me. She took a small step away and became part of the shadows. Very calmly, she said, “I think I hate you, Dog.”

“That's good, because you wouldn't understand the purchase price of the stuff.”

“I understand, all right. I should have listened to you sooner. The world
would
be a lot better off without people like you.”

“Then stick around and see it happen.”

“I intend to, Dog. It's what you wanted me to do anyway, wasn't it?”

My guts knotted up inside me, but I had to get it out. “Yes.” I looked around for Ferris, waiting to hear his sardonic little chuckle.

But Ferris had disappeared back into the past and had left me alone with his terrible present.

You don't maintain a posture of dignity when you're staring down the ugly muzzle of a .45 automatic. Not when you know the history of the guy behind the blued steel and thought that he had been eliminated hours ago. Not when you're in a pair of striped shorts and nothing else, with skinny legs that couldn't hold still and a lovely blonde woman who had brand-new case-hardened eyes watching you out of mild curiosity and total disdain.

I said, “Just one more time, friend, or Weller-Fabray loses your services permanently. You know the new contact number and you know where he's at.”

“Please ... Mr. Kelly, you know what will happen if I tell you where ...”

I grinned that same old nasty grin and he saw my hand tighten around the gun butt. “I know what will happen if you don't.”

It wasn't much of a choice. If he told me, at least he had an hour's head start.

So he told me and I coldcocked him for a long sleep with the Colt.

I put the gun away and let my expression fade back where it came from and went back to the truck with Sharon. I looked at my watch. We still had another hour before sunrise. It was the time of day when New York City was in its postorgasmic trance, buried in its smog-choked dreams, the hour between those going and those coming. The rain was trying hard, but there would never be enough of it to clean the stains from its steel-and-concrete skin. I turned the truck and cut across town to a gas station where I had one phone call to make, filled the tank, grabbed two coffees from the dispenser and got back in the cab again.

When Sharon took the steaming cup I handed her she said, “Would you really have killed him, Dog?”

I shoved the gear lever in low and let the clutch out. “He wouldn't have been the first.”

“I didn't ask you that.”

“He
thought so,” I told her.

 

A long time ago Freeport had been a lazy little village on Long Island, a short pleasure jaunt down the Sunrise Highway from the big zoo of Fun City. But that was a long time ago before progress had set in, with miscalculated planning and the population explosion to guide it. Now it was just another choked-up town with bumper-to-bumper parked cars walling it in, demanding to be called a suburb, struggling against the ebb and flow of traffic and charge accounts.

I found the street and I found the number of the pale yellow house that was the last on the block and coasted into the driveway with the lights off.