The Juror (15 page)

S
LAVKO
opens his eyes as far as he can, a hairline crack, wondering what in the world is
that
thing? Wing? Silver saucer? Or maybe it’s not in the world. Maybe it’s from some other world. Shimmery, and alien, and skimming
along in the darkness—

It takes him half a minute to realize this is his own rearview mirror he’s peering at.

Oh shit. Did I fall asleep on a stakeout?

He tries to sit up. His brain ripples like the northern lights.

I got
drunk
on a stakeout? I’m on the skids again?

He gets a grip on the steering wheel and pulls himself up. He tries to muster some notion of where he is. Still dark. He checks
his watch: 5:30
A.M.
Light drizzle on the windshield. One streetlight, a row of dark townhouses that look vaguely familiar.

And then he catches a faint lingering of that woman’s fragrance… and the whole night comes spiraling back to him.

Sari.

Sweet beautiful Sari.

Immediately thereafter comes a painful thought of Juliet. But he silently hisses at it: Ha! You weren’t the first thing to
come into my thoughts, were you, Juliet? Not this morning. You’re not queen of my thoughts
this
morning.

Headlights flash in the mirror.

Slavko instinctively sinks down in his seat.

A car, two men inside, slowly passes him and comes to a stop. Slavko’s eyes are just high enough to see above the dash, and
he watches as the passenger-side door of the car swings open. The dome-light comes on. The passenger gets out and flicks his
hand at the driver, a quick dismissive wave. He’s got strong cheekbones, and an air of prepossession, and Slavko’s pretty
sure that this is Sari’s boy-friend Eben.

The car moves off. Dull sedan. Late-80s Camry?—something like that. Slavko has always been weak on makes and models, and it’s
too dark to read plates. So he lets the car go, and he keeps his eyes on Eben Rackland as the man strides up to his townhouse
door, uses his key and steps in.

Slavko gets out his little black logbook.

He jots down the time, the location, his impressions of E.R. It’s his impression that E.R. is fresh and alert and has had
a good night’s sleep. It’s also Slavko’s impression—though he doesn’t trouble to write it—that E.R. has been sleeping somewhere
else lately but would just as soon the world thought he was sleeping here. Slavko’s foremost impression is that if he doesn’t
get his own brain coated with coffee soon, it will throb itself into a gray gruel.

But he stays where he is.

He hunches down in his seat and nails his gaze to the townhouse door. He waits.

The leaves of the trees along the sidewalk turn from black to russet, russet to rose.

He belches. He gets a taste of roast beef, Jim Beam, bile and mayonnaise.

Lights come on in the other townhouses. A woman comes out trailing her dogs. Someone else heads to work. Presently E.R. emerges
from the townhouse wearing a suit and bearing a briefcase. He gets into his red Lotus. Slavko hears a snatch of baroque violins
before the car slips away.

Meanwhile Slavko’s own Buzzard is wheezing, not starting, bitching about the cold and the damp and the hour.

Finally the engine catches.

Running a one-man tail, it’s one thing that Slavko thinks he does pretty well. You’ve got to
know
—got to feel in your gut because it can’t be taught—when to drop back and when to muscle in. Today it helps that he’s familiar
with this part of Westchester. And it helps that the quarry seems to have no anxiety about any glue on his ass.

The Lotus cruises through Yorktown Heights and pulls onto the interstate, and Slavko stays on it. Heading south. Toward the
city.

But the farther south they go, the less enthusiasm he feels for this pursuit. He’s cold. The wind whistles through that rusted-out
hole in the floor beside his left foot. He wants his bed. And after all, he already knows where this guy’s headed. Wall Street.
His work. And no way is Slavko going to sit parked across from some Manhattan garage, chewing Alka-Seltzers and feeding quarters
into a smirking parking meter and grinding his knuckles into his eyes and reading the want ads in the
Post
and just hanging around in the car all day like a pair of fuzzy dice.

And speaking of hanging around wasting time, why is he still hanging on to this case?

After all, he thinks, Sari told me to forget the whole thing. So who’s my client? What am I doing here? Who am I working for?

Look in the mirror.

Right. Exactly. And how much is the moron in the mirror paying you?

The usual.

He decides to pull off at the next exit, go right home, and get some sleep.

But at the next exit E.R. eases off the interstate ahead of him. He’s not looking for gas either: there are no gas stations
around here. He takes a right on Route 22, and Slavko keeps after him.

They snake north for a few miles. Horse pastures, Slavko’s deadly nausea, a white church. Slavko cedes E.R. the curves and
the hills, but watches for that red flash on the straightaways.

At a forest crossroads the Lotus hangs a right. So does the Buzzard. There’s a dam and a pumphouse and then the road winds
alongside a slate-gray reservoir. Slavko follows blindly. This is one of those times, he’s thinking, when you have to trust
to sheer faith that you haven’t lost your man.

The road takes a sharp turn, and abruptly starts across the reservoir on a long straight causeway.

The Lotus isn’t on this causeway. The Lotus isn’t anywhere to be seen. Sheer faith has failed him. The Lotus is gone.

Could E.R. have gotten so far ahead so quickly? Slavko doesn’t think so. But then where is he?

Could he have turned off somewhere?

Slavko thinks back. Since his last glimpse of the red car, since the crossroads, it’s all been woods and reservoir. No driveways,
no houses.

Although… there
was
that pumphouse….

He steps on it. Pours it on so he can get to the end of this causeway, so he can turn the hell around….

A
NNIE
waits where Johnny told her to wait, on the reservoir’s rocky shore. She hears footsteps, and she glances back. Zach Lyde
has arrived. He sits on a rock close to her.

He gives her a look of tender concern.

“How are you holding up, Annie?”

“Fine.”

Struggling to keep her anger bottled. But even in the one word it spills out.

“And Oliver? Is he all right?”

She says, “I was wondering what you thought about Oliver. Since you listen to everything we say, maybe you have a better idea—”

“I don’t enjoy invading your privacy.”

“You don’t
enjoy
it? You sound like an undertaker, you know that?”

He lets that go. “You’re new at this,” he tells her. “It’s simple prudence for me to listen in. Do you think we can afford
even the slightest error?”

She looks off across the water. A car is crossing the causeway over there. Coming this way and it seems to be in a great hurry.

Zach Lyde says, “Look, I know this won’t be welcome, but I’m going to say it. You’re being too hard on your child.”

By now her anger has short-circuited half her brain, so that even if she could think of anything to snap back with, she wouldn’t
have the presence of mind to utter it.

He says, “I’m not trying to tell you how to raise him. But if you kept treating him so strangely, so harshly—suppose he guesses
what’s going on? Suppose he talks to a friend?”

She says, “He won’t guess. He’s just a kid.”

“He’s quick, though. Show caution, treat him gently. The same with your friends. I understand that you want to keep them at
arm’s distance. That’s wise. But if you drive them off precipitously they’ll start to worry. They’ll come around with questions.
This Turtle, who is he? A boyfriend?”

“What difference does that make?”

“Where does he live, Annie?”

“Why do you care?”

“Answer my question.”

“He lives somewhere in California. Do you want to kill him? I don’t remember exactly where. Some small town. I haven’t talked
to him in years—”

“You mentioned to him that you two had talked last spring.”

“So? He’s sort of a pest, he calls a lot. You want to kill him?”

“Annie.”

“Go ahead, kill him.”

“I don’t want to kill anyone.”

“It won’t devastate
me
—”

“I only want to get this over with. Painlessly. Quietly. Help me with this.”

“I’ll do what I can! All right? You son of a bitch.”

She rubs her eyes against her shirtsleeve—a quick swipe, to get the tears off her face. Then she turns to him, and this time
she holds his eyes.

He says, “You have more power than you know.”

Then they hear a car, driving up to the pumphouse behind them. He tells her, “I don’t know who it is, but don’t look. Look
at the lake. My colleague will take care of it.”

S
LAVKO
brakes beside the pumphouse. Not far from the Lotus. And here’s the Camry as well—the car that let off E.R. at his condo.

In the driver’s seat of this Camry sits a goon. Ugly as sin he is, with a squashed nose. He glowers at Slavko. Maybe, Slavko
thinks, I ought not to be malingering here.

But he does allow himself one quick look around—and he spots them. Sitting on the rocks by the water, E.R. and a woman. He
can’t see much of her. The back of her head, her long brown hair. And unless he wants to waddle on over there and get up-close-and-personal
about their love life, he’s got about as much data as he’s going to get. Time to go. The goon, Mr. Ugly-As-Sin, has opened
his car door and he’s getting out and getting uglier by the second. Slavko waggles his fingers affably at the man. Then he
slams the Buzzard into reverse.

He backs right into a clump of weeds, with the muffler scraping out a tune against the stones.

He guns forward. He turns the wheel hard and the Buzzard twists and lurches and Ugly-As-Sin jumps back. Slavko hauls ass out
of there.

A
NNIE
’s eyes are on the water. Behind her the sound of the car’s engine dies away.

Zach Lyde asks her, “Annie, at the courthouse yesterday? The cross of Paulie DeCicco? Did you understand our strategy?”

She nods.

He says, “What’s our strategy, Annie?”

“That Louie Boffano didn’t order the killing. He’s in the mob and maybe he’s a bad guy but he’s, he’s a figurehead. He doesn’t
give the orders.”

“Good. That’s right. But if he’s not guilty, who is? Who
did
kill Salvadore Riggio and his grandson?”

She raises her eyes, narrows her eyes and says, “You did.”

His smile crawls up the side of his face. “You think
I’m
the Teacher?”

“Are you?”

“I would have you believe it. The Teacher scares you, doesn’t he? And if I can keep you scared, Annie, I can save your life.”

Some strands of her hair have stuck to the dried tears on her cheeks. He reaches out and slides his fingers under them, lifts
them, pushes them back.

He says, “When we need to talk to you again, we’ll find you on the road. We’ll flash our lights once, then twice more. All
right?”

She nods.

“You and Oliver, I still can save you both, can’t I? Annie?”

S
LAVKO
talks to the cup of coffee he picked up at the Wendy’s takeout. Scorch me awake, he says silently. Harrow my tongue. Tell
me what the hell I saw by that reservoir.

Was it an assignation with a mistress?

OK. Except E.R.’s not married so why would he need to skulk around? Who’s he hiding her from, from Sari? But he’s been dating
Sari less than a year. So why would he be going to such lengths to keep another woman from her? Sounds kind of squirmy. Doesn’t
sound like the powerful soulful E.R. that Sari’s so crazy about.

Any other bright ideas?

Slavko gets off Route 114 and onto whatever this road is that runs behind the telephone company building. He figures if he
doesn’t hit a lot of red lights he’ll be in his bed in twenty minutes. In that crumb-infested but nevertheless golden sack.

He lifts his cup, takes another sip of black flames.

Maybe it’s the
woman
who’s hitched. She married rich, she’s got her own personal goon guard, but then she met Eben the Powerful and now she has
to sneak out and meet her darling by the pumphouse….

But then why wasn’t she
snuggling
with her E.R.? Why was she sitting so far apart from him on the rocks, and why doesn’t any of this add up to jackshit and
furthermore why does Slavko feel saner this morning, why does he feel mentally and emotionally healthier—despite his hangover—than
he has since…

Since the last time I slept with Juliet, in fact—but O you sick Brain of Mine, O you desperate Glutton for Misery, do we really
need to delve into
that
just now?