Black River (15 page)

“Would you be happier?”

She searched his eyes for a sign of irony.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“I wouldn’t,” he said. “If Bill
gave me the place tomorrow, lock, stock, and barrel, paid for,
tax-free.”

“Yeah?”

“Once the buzz wore off, once I’d had
everybody I know over for dinner and got used to the idea of owning the
most expensive piece of residential property in America…
?” He hesitated. “A week later I wouldn’t be any
happier than I was when I got up this morning.”

As the house slid slowly to stern, she seemed to
consider and discard a number of responses. The moon was directly
overhead. The surface of the lake glowed like molten glass. “Me
neither,” she said finally.

“You hungry?” Corso asked.

“What I am is thirsty.”

“What would you like?”

“What do you drink?”

“Bourbon.”

“Then let there be bourbon.” She toasted
with an imaginary glass. “And come to think of it, I’m
starved.”

Corso pulled open the liquor cabinet and pulled out a
half gallon of Jack Daniel’s. In the cabinet above the stove, he
found a pair of thick tumblers, filled each with ice, and added four
fingers of bourbon. He handed Renee Rogers her drink and lifted his
own. “Here’s to putting Nicholas Balagula behind
bars.”

They clicked glasses. Corso took a sip. Rogers
swallowed half the drink. Corso set the bourbon bottle on the
drainboard next to the sink. “Bottle’s here,” he
said. “From now on, it’s self-service.”

“Just the way I like it.”

“We could probably rustle up a couple of steaks
and a salad on the way back, if you want.”

“I’m not very handy.”

“Look in the bottom of the refrigerator. I think
there’s a new bag of salad greens in there.”

She crossed the galley, pulled open the refrigerator
door, and extracted a plastic bag full of greens. Corso put the
transmissions into neutral, throttled all the way back, and switched
off the engines. For a moment, the big boat floated in silence. Then
Corso pushed the chrome button on the console and the generator sprang
to life.

“You actually cook for yourself?” she
asked.

“All the time.”

“I eat out. Or do takeout or call room service or
whatever.”

“There was a time when I couldn’t go out
without attracting a crowd and having cameras shoved in my face. I
kinda got in the habit of eating in.”

She watched the memory wash across his dark face.
“You actually hate it, don’t you?”

“Hate what?”

“The celebrity.”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“A lot of them say they do, but I don’t
think so. I think it’s chic and humble to pretend you don’t
like being famous, but I think most people, once they’ve had
their moment in the sun, would rather have it than not, no matter what
they say in public.”

“Celebrity as the opiate of the
people.”

She laughed. “Something like that.”

She bounced the bag of salad greens in the palm of her
hand. “What are we gonna put on this?”

“Look on the refrigerator door. There’s a
bunch of different things in there. Pick something you like.”

She rummaged around in the door for a minute and came
out with an unopened bottle of honey mustard dressing. “This
okay?” she asked.

“Works for me,” Corso said.

She downed the rest of her drink and poured herself
another and then downed half of that. Corso sprinkled salt and pepper
on a pair of T-bone steaks.

“I’m going to the stern and fire up the
barbecue,” he said. He reached over and flipped up the teak lid
above the sink. Plates, glasses, silverware. “Why don’t you
set the table and then dump some of that stuff on the salad and mix it
up. You think you can handle that?”

She took a pull from her glass. “Are you making
fun of me?”

“Just a little,” he said. “I’ll
be right back.”

Friday, October 20

10:53 p.m.

G
erardo knew the drill. He’d been
watching all day. The shift was about to change. For the next ten
minutes, the hospital corridors would be virtually empty, as one shift
of doctors, nurses, and orderlies left the floor and another came on
duty.

He pushed his burnished aluminum cleaning cart to the
side of the corridor and pretended to rearrange his cleaning supplies.
Sixty feet down the hall, a pair of white-clad nurses came out of Room
One-oh-nine and hurried up the hall toward the nurses’
station.

He’d talked it over with Ramón, talked
more than the whole fifteen years they’d been together. Nothing
was going right lately. The way things had been going, it might be time
to clean up their messes. Might be best if Gerardo was ready to run
backup too, just to be sure. Lotta stuff going on in that part of the
hospital. Might be best to have another gun, just in case somebody
walked in or something. You never knew.

Ramón Javier looked like he belonged at
a board meeting. He wore a somber gray suit, a blue tie, and a pair of
tasseled loafers that gleamed from a recent shine. The .22-caliber
automatic with the noise suppressor was tucked into the back of his
pants, leaving the lines of the suit undisturbed as he stepped off the
elevator and started down the hall.

He saw Gerardo standing behind a cart full of towels,
wearing rubber gloves and a pair of baby-blue scrubs. Not his color at
all. Made him look like a troll. Ramón pretended not to notice
him, instead striding by, heading for One-oh-nine down at the corner.
Probably could have just walked in and popped her on his own, but
things were a little bit loosey-goosey lately, so they were playing it
safe. The whole damn thing shouldn’t take more than a minute. A
minute, and they’d be halfway back to the kind of programmed
normality upon which Ramón thrived.

At the corner, he stopped, checked the corridor to his
left, and looked back at Gerardo, who offered a small nod that said the
room was empty. Gerardo busied himself with a clear plastic spray
bottle. Ramón took a deep breath, pulled open the door, and
stepped into the room.

As the door closed behind Ramón, Gerardo
began a silent count in his head. If he got to a hundred, it meant
trouble and he was going in. His mother told him trouble came in
threes. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. They’d already had three:
the dead guy, the truck coming unburied, and the girl walking in on
them. Twenty-three, twenty-four. Didn’t need no more damn
disasters. Just a nice clean kill and out the door. He checked the
hallway. Nothing but a big-ass nurse, standing with her hands on her
hips way down at the opposite end of the building. Thirty-seven,
thirty-eight.

The room was lit only by the machines
surrounding the bed. Ramón pulled the .22 from the back of his
pants, thumbed off the safety, and placed the end of the suppressor
against the side of the bandaged head. He listened for the sound of
feet in the hall, heard nothing, and pulled the trigger. The pile of
bandages rocked violently to the right and then snapped back into
place. The electronic images went wild, dancing over their monitors
like insects on fire. The small symmetrical hole began to leak blood,
as Ramón placed the suppressor against the top of the head and
fired again. Just to be sure.

He was at fifty-one when he heard the voice.
“Hey, you,” she called from the opposite end of the hall.
Nigger bitch. Big enough to plow a field. Gerardo pretended not to
hear. “You speak English?
¿Habla
inglés
?”

Gerardo whistled softly and sorted through a pile of
small towels until his hand came to rest upon the taped grip of the
automatic. A warm feeling spread through his body, even as he listened
to the sound of her shoes squeaking down the long corridor in his
direction.

“You hear me down there?” she demanded.
“We got a mess up in One-sixty-four.”

She kept coming his way and then, suddenly, from the
direction of the nurses’ station, a guy appeared,
thirty-something, hair and brown beard in need of a trim. He carried a
newspaper under his left arm. As he reached the corner, he hesitated
for a moment and then grabbed the handle of One-oh-nine, pulled it
open, and stepped inside.

“You got an earwax problem or what?” she
demanded. No more than thirty feet away now. Beneath the pile of linen,
Gerardo thumbed the safety off and turned her way, grinning
maniacally. Pointing at his ear, as if to say he could not hear. When
he peeked back over his shoulder, the hall was empty.

Ramón was halfway back to the door when
it began to open. He stepped quickly into the shadow behind the door,
which kept opening and opening until it had him pressed flat against
the wall. The figure stepped into the room and stood for a second as
the door hissed shut, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom.
Ramón was already moving his way when the figure emitted a low
moan and ran to the bedside. The bright white screen had gone black.
The green hillocks of her heartbeat crawled over the screen like
flatworms. The visitor reached out and touched her head, brought the
hand up to his face, stared for a brief second at the stain, and
turned, wide-eyed, toward the door. From a distance of two feet,
Ramón shot him between the eyes.

A buzzer was going off. Her hand was on his
elbow, pushing him up the hall. Gerardo’s hand rested on the butt
of his automatic. Eighty-three, eighty-four. He’d already
decided: one hundred and the bitch dies. Then, a second later,
Ramón was standing in the hall. He gave Gerardo a small nod that
meant the job was done and then began following along in their
wake.

“Come on.” The bitch pulled harder on his
arm. Gerardo snuck another peek, just as Ramón turned left at
the exit sign and started for the stairs. At the far end of the hall, a
trio of nurses hurried into Room One-oh-nine. He heard a scream and
then another. The nurse loosened her grip and then let him go
altogether. The door to One-oh-nine burst open. The front of the
nurse’s uniform was a glistening smear of blood. Her mouth was a
frozen circle. Gerardo wrapped the automatic in a fresh towel and stuck
it under his arm. For seventy feet, he shuffled along behind his
captor as she hurried back toward the shouts and confusion. At the
overhead exit sign, he straight-armed the door, stepped into the
stairwell, and began jogging up the stairs. At the first landing, he
threw his hip into the emergency exit door and stepped outside into
the cool night air. “One down, one to go,” he whispered to
himself, as he started up the sidewalk.

Friday, October 20

10:57 p.m.

A
long the north shore of Lake Union, the
derelict ferry
Kalakala
lay beached like
some moldering gray carcass washed ashore by the tide. Once the pride
of the Seattle fleet, the Art Deco
Kalakala
had been rescued by a local businessman, whose sense of nostalgia had
been offended by the notion that the ferry of his childhood seemed
destined to live out its final days as an Alaskan fish-packing
plant.

At considerable expense, he’d had her towed down
from Alaska and berthed at her current location, only to find that his
fellow Seattleites did not share his fondness for the old vessel. Not
only were they unwilling to participate in her proposed
multimillion-dollar renovation but most considered her little more than
an eyesore and demanded that she be removed from sight forthwith.
Under intense pressure from the city, her owner now sought a suitable
buyer who might be willing to take her off his hands.

As the rusted hull slid to starboard, Renee Rogers
stepped over to the refrigerator and filled her glass with ice cubes,
which she then drowned in bourbon.

“Warren would hate this,” she said.

“Hate what?”

“Hate us bobbing around out here on the lake
together. He gave me a little lecture the other day about what he
called
commiserating
with you.”

“Have we been doing that? And here I thought we
were just trying to pick each other’s brains over
dinner.”

She laughed and looked around. “We’re
almost back, aren’t we?” she said.

“Up ahead on the left.”

The purple had faded from the horizon, leaving a
charcoal sky. The air had begun to thicken with mist, turning the full
moon to a hazy nickel.

She took another pull from her drink. “So how
come you never got married?” she asked, out of the blue.

Corso pulled his gaze from the lake and looked her way.
Her eyes looked tired, and her words carried just the hint of a
slur.

“How do you know I’ve never been
married?”

She laughed. “I’ve read your file, of
course. You don’t think we let you in the courtroom without doing
our homework, do you?”

“What about you?” Corso asked.
“You’ve never managed it either.”

She made a
tsk-tsk
sound.
“You’ve got a file on me too, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

She laughed again. “You ever notice how small
talk suffers when you’re talking to somebody you’ve got a
dossier on?”

Corso’s shoulders shook with laughter. It took
him a moment before he was able to speak. “Especially when they
don’t know.”

Renee Rogers threw her head back and laughed. Corso
kept on.

“You already know everything you’d normally
ask them at a time like that, so you’re five minutes into a
conversation with a stranger, and if you’re not careful
you’re asking them about that mole they had removed last year, a
story that they can’t, for the life of them, remember having
shared with you.”

“And they spend the rest of the night looking at
you out of the corner of their eyes.”

They shared another laugh, before Corso asked.
“So? How come you never managed it either?”

“I asked you first.”

He thought it over. “I was engaged once, but
things didn’t work out,” he said, after a moment.
“It’s not like I planned it that way or anything. Always
seemed to me like I might be ready to settle down after the next
assignment or after the next big story.” He shrugged. “It
just kept getting pushed somewhere down the road until I was so used to
being like I was”—he took one hand off the
wheel—“that it stopped being an issue.”

She folded her arms and turned her eyes inward.

“You like living alone?” she said, after a
short silence.

“I’m used to it. The longer I do it, the
more it suits me.”

“You don’t get lonely?”

“You can be married with five kids and still be
lonely.”

She gestured with her glass. “Your Honor. The
witness is being unresponsive. Please direct him to answer the
question.”

He chuckled. “Yeah…Sometimes, I
guess—you know—sometimes it would be nice to have somebody
to do things with.”

“I hate eating out alone,” Renee Rogers
offered.

“Me too. That’s another reason why I
cook.”

She finished her drink. “When I get home,
I’m going to dust off all the cookbooks I’ve gotten as
presents over the years and give it a try.” She held up two
fingers, Boy Scout–style. “I hereby resolve to be more
domestic.” The slur was stronger now. She seemed to notice and
turned her face toward the windows.

Corso pulled back on the throttles, allowing the wind
and the water to slow the boat’s momentum and ease
Saltheart
to a stop alongside the floating
dock.

Renee Rogers pushed herself from the seat.
“I’ll help,” she announced.

“No need,” Corso said. “I’ve
got it. Docking’s easier,” he lied.

He moved quickly down the stairs and out onto the deck.
First he went forward and threw the bowline down onto the dock, then
grabbed a trio of fenders and spaced them along the rail as he made his
way to the stern. By the time he’d finished getting the stairs
in place, the wind had moved the boat six feet from the dock and he
had to step inside and readjust the bow thruster. Renee Rogers was
leaning back against the sink, rolling her icy glass across her
forehead. Corso stepped back outside, climbed to the bottom step, and
hopped down onto the dock.

Took him five minutes to moor the boat to his
satisfaction and reconnect the electrical power and the phone line.
When he stepped back into the galley, Renee Rogers was leaning over the
counter, taking deep breaths through her open mouth.

“You okay?” he asked.

She gave a silent shake of the head and continued
staring down into the sink as Corso stepped around her and turned off
the engines.

“Anything I can do?” he asked.

She stood up straight and brought a hand to her throat.
“I don’t know, I think maybe it’s the rocking of the
boat. I feel dizzy.”

“Come on,” he said, offering a hand. She
took it, and he led her down into the salon and sat her on the couch.
“Relax.”

She leaned back on the couch, brought a hand up to her
forehead, closed her eyes, and took several deep breaths.

“This is so embarrassing,” she said.

“The water affects people differently.”

She massaged the back of her neck and nodded
slightly.

“Relax,” Corso said. “I’m going
to do a few chores. I’ll be right back.”

It took him the better part of ten minutes to round up
all the plates and glasses, rinse everything, and get it into the
dishwasher. When he returned to the salon, Renee Rogers hadn’t
moved. He sat down next to her on the sofa and jostled her arm. He
tried three times before her eyes blinked open. “How ya
doin’?” he asked.

“Not very well, I’m afraid. One minute I
was feeling fine….”

“Listen,” Corso said. “I’ve got
an idea. I’ve got a real nice forward berth with its own head.
Why don’t you lie down there until you’re feeling
better.”

She started to protest, but Corso kept talking.

“You wake up and feel better, we’ll call
you a cab. You sleep till morning, and I’ll make you breakfast.
Whatta you say?”

She tried to get to her feet. “I couldn’t,
really.” Her hand slipped on the arm of the sofa, and she fell
back onto the couch.

Corso held out his hand. “Come on,” he
said.

He left his hand extended until finally she reached out
and took it. Slowly, he pulled her to her feet and led her back
through the galley to the four stairs leading down to the forward
berth and the chain locker. She slipped slightly on the second step,
but Corso was there to take her by the shoulders and ease her to the
lower deck.

He slid open the door to the berth. “Here it
is,” he said. “Take it easy for a while. See how you
feel.”

“This is terrible,” she said.
“I’m so embarrassed.”

“Nothing to be embarrassed about,” he said
as he steered her into the room until the backs of her legs were
against the bed. “Just make yourself comfortable.”

She pulled the coverlet back, sat, and swung her feet
up onto the bed, then noticed her shoes. She used her right foot to pry
off the opposite sneaker, then reversed the process. Corso grabbed the
Nikes and set them on the floor next to the bed.

“Just till I’m feeling better,” she
said.

“I’ll button things up for the night and
then come back and see how you’re doing. We’ll figure out
where to go from there.”

“Okay,” she said, closing her eyes.

She was snoring before he got the door closed. He
reached over, drew the coverlet over her shoulder, and made his way up
and forward. Turned off the dock lights and the heat and finally,
almost as an afterthought, flipped on the carpet alarm. He started
outside to pull up the stairs but stopped himself. Figured he better
wait and see what was going on with Rogers. On his way through the
salon, he cracked a couple of windows.