Bomber's Law (24 page)

“I had that new Lexus coupe the narcos nabbed from that contractor up in Newburyport,” he said. “It's either
very
distinctive, because you know what it is, what it can do and how much it costs, or else you don't know what it is or any of those other intimidating details, and you don't give a shit either, so to you it's not distinctive at all. To you it looks exactly the same's every other one of those hippy new coupes designed in a wind-tunnel: like a slope-nosed, fast-moving, four-wheeled, Fabergé egg.”

“Oh,” she said, “I didn't know you had that. How'd you like it?”

He shrugged. “It's a nice car,” he said. “Course how much I like it's really not much more'n an academic question, considering that buying one of those units for our very own wouldn't leave us much more'n pushcart-lunch money out of forty grand. Which the last time I looked was approximately twenty-five grand more'n we should even think about spending on road-going trinkets.”

“That much,” she said.

“Times've changed,” he said. “The best things in life now cost plenty.” He paused, then said slyly: “Unless you'd want to consider, say, setting our little boy free, and then investing what we're spending on his incarceration on some root-tee-toot hot wheels.”

Without shifting her gaze she smiled a very small smile and said: “Which you, of course, much rather would.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Car or no car, I still would.”

She shook her head twice, very slightly, hardly moving it at all. “We've been through all this a hundred times, Harry,” she said, her voice soft and caressing. “You agreed to it when we were first deciding whether to get married. The Abbey's a fourth-generation tradition for boys in my family. We all feel very strongly about it.”

“I know,” he said, “but it isn't in mine. I agreed to it, yeah, but before I knew, really knew what I'd signed the kid up for. He was always at home when I got home at night. Even last year, while I was out west there, yeah, he was asleep, by the time I got home. But still, it was better'n this. I could look in his room and
see
him, at least say ‘Good night' to the kid. Now I'm back home again, every night, and I don't even have that much—at least it was better'n this.” He hesitated. “I wasn't ready for this, that's all, Gayle. I just wasn't ready for how it would be, when we really drove up there, and left him and came back without him. I know your father and your brothers all went there …”

“And all of my nephews, too,” she said. “Don't leave them out of this either. All five of the nephews were Abbey.”

“I know,” he said, “and I don't deny they're all good men now. Maybe if some of Roy's cousins were still there, if maybe he had them around, to sort of back him up, you know? Maybe then I wouldn't feel this way. But seven years old? Jesus Gayle, when the kid's just turned seven? He's barely seven years old? I dunno, I just
think it's too soon, now. Now, now maybe I know what I didn't know then, back before we got married: Seven years old is too early. Seven is just too damned too young. To be sent to New Hampshire alone.”

She sighed. “We're not going to reopen this, Harry,” she said. “I don't want to go through it again.”

“Life sucks, and then you die,” he said.

“And when you get up in the night,” she said, “it's always three in the morning, and somebody's left the seat up.”

Route 106 westbound met 138 southbound at a four-cornered intersection occupied at each angle by a one-story retail establishment designed and constructed in confident reliance on two invariable characteristics of persons traveling by motor vehicle. The first is that such persons welcome if they do not in fact absolutely require at every such four-way intersection a choice of familiar products—gasoline and engine-oil; nationally-advertised fast foods; the usual packaged products available in franchised convenience stores—the vast majority of said products either to be pumped or poured into their motor vehicles, or to be ingested, chewed if necessary, and swallowed into their bodies. And that such persons will therefore appreciatively interrupt their journeys to purchase the products at a profit to the thoughtful businessman. The second principle is that without exception the end products of
all
liquids or solids sold to and consumed by travelers consist solely and entirely of virtually-invisible gases and vapors just as odorlessly insubstantial as those of the gasoline burned in the engines.

Mossi, ignoring both principles, caught the traffic-light changing to green in his favor and turned the old gray Cadillac left onto 138 southbound without hesitating at the corner. “Fine, fine, excellent,” Dell'Appa said. “Our man's kidney and bladder functions are in good working order, apparently unimpaired by prostate enlargement so unfortunately common among men of his age. No indications of frequent need or urge to urinate, so no need to stop and beg some pimpled kid for access to a private toilet. Shows you what clean living'll do for a chap.” He followed the Cadillac through the turn, allowing a woman approaching eastbound on 106 in a blue Dodge 600 convertible to turn right and precede him behind Mossi's Cadillac southbound on 138.

The asphalt parking lot between the westerly edge of the road and the white buildings looming over the Coldstream dogtrack was broad and deep enough to accommodate around 2,500 cars. Since it contained no more than 300 shortly after 11:00
A.M.
, when Mossi entered it from 138, to Dell'Appa, continuing southbound on 138, it looked enormous, as though started there by someone who'd intended to pave the entire town, maybe the whole county, and had made an impressive beginning, too, until he'd either lost interest in the enterprise or run out of asphalt and quit. Mossi disregarded the painted lines marking off lanes and spaces and took a diagonal approach to the two-story clubhouse west-southwest of the roadway, the old Cadillac hurrying by itself across the man-made desert to the parked cars huddled near the clubhouse like some mechanical buffalo galloping to rejoin a familiar metallic herd. Dell'Appa, slowing down, drove about half a mile south of the last entrance into the lot before easing the Lexus over onto the shoulder, allowing the cars behind him to pass so that he could make a U-turn and return alone to Coldstream.

“Well, okay,” he said to Gayle, finishing his stew, “no harm in trying, I guess. The thing of it is, with Mossi, I mean: I'd already given him time. He's an experienced evildoer, sure, but even though I was born yesterday, it was early. Getting there two hours before post-time for the first race, he wouldn't've had any trouble parking up close to the main gate, and the amount of time I'd given him before I came back and drove in was more'n enough to've let him get out of the car, lock it up and then go all the way inside.”

“And therefore, just for that reason,” she said, “wouldn't've that been just what he
wouldn't
've done? Done all of those things and just gone right in, precisely because he would've been smart enough to know that was just what you'd be expecting him to do? Would be depending on him to do? And so he didn't? Instead he waited, just inside the door, or whatever they've got there, where you couldn't see him when you drove up, but he could watch you, doing it.”

“Well obviously,” he had said, “obviously that has to've been exactly what he did do. Because the only thing he actually knew—not even knew, really; ‘suspected' would've been the closest he could've come to ‘knowing,' really being sure, up until then—when he saw the Lexus come into that North Dakota of a parking lot there, was that
maybe the person in the Lexus was sitting in on his tail for Bob Brennan today, and that was why he'd seen the coupe but he hadn't seen the Blazer in his rearview since Marie's.”

“But when he
did
see that,” she said, “saw the Lexus pulling in …”

“Oh, sure,” he said, “no question. Those cars aren't that common. Oh, it would've been
possible
, sure, course it would've, for somebody else, just by coincidence, to've driven a maroon SC Three Hundred up from Providence, coming from the opposite direction he and I'd both just come from, pull into the track not ten minutes after he did and the other forty-thousand-dollar maroon sled'd gone by,
toward
Providence. Possible sure, but not bloody likely. No, once he'd caught me being cute, so he wouldn't catch me, well then, he'd caught me, hadn't he? And any doubt he might've had about whether I was Brennan for at least today—remember that silly show Dave Maynard used to have on Channel Four, and then Five, on Sunday mornings? The one where fat little girls who couldn't twirl batons came out in pink majorette costumes with stiff little skirts that stuck out all around them, like their own personal toadstools, the white shako hats and white boots, and they proved it?”

“ ‘Community Auditions',” she said. “The little fat girls always wore glasses with red frames that they had to keep pushing back up on their noses, and you could see them moving their lips, counting the beat, while they did it. And they always dropped the batons. Community Opticians was the sponsor. And the big-breasted girls who played the accordions that all the nasty-male viewers at home always hoped'd catch and pinch them.”

“They also had guys who played accordions,” he said. “And looked damned near as foolish. And guys who sang, too. There was one kid once who tried to sing ‘Feelings,' like Barry Manilow did, and I guess his hormones must've just kicked in or something, because you could see he had feelings, all right; if he'd had any more'n he was obviously having then, his zipper would've burst.”

“Nerves,” she said. “Stage-fright doesn't affect everyone in quite the same way. Some find it all quite exciting. Arousing, even.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Well, Maynard used to have to sing ‘Star of the day/Who will it be?' at the beginning of the show, and that's what Mossi should've been doing when I got close enough to the glass
doors at the entrance for him to check me out. ‘Tail of the day/Who can it be?' ”

“Did he recognize you?” she said.

“Doubt it,” he said. “In fact I'm ninety percent sure he didn't. Because what way would there've been for him to do it, to've seen me before, so he could? When I was in Boston on my first tour, keep in mind, most of the work I was doing kept me in the office most of the time. Making the models of that stuff that was going on on the North Shore, first the fires and then the bank loans. And then when I finally did get to go out, all by myself,—after I promised, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, that I wouldn't talk to strangers or get in any strange man's car and go for ice cream with him—and actully
do
a little field-work, well, you know what happened then. Soon's my own data-acquisition and collection made it so what I was getting was beginning to resemble the data that I needed, even if it wasn't a perfect match for it, I was out on my butt. No sooner did I reach the point where I knew the investigation was being done in the right way, because I was
doing
it all myself and I at least knew what I was doing, than somebody got a hair across his big fat ass, became extremely nervous, and ordered me transported to the colonies. So, where would Mossi've seen me before, for him to've made the connection?”

“A murder out there, maybe?” she said. “He was out there planning a murder with someone, and somebody pointed you out to him, a bar or some restaurant or something?”

“Possible,” he said. “Might've happened but unlikely. West of the Blackstone Valley's a different jurisdiction for them, the New York–New Haven–Hartford–Springfield axis. Worcester's in that orbit, too. Everything east of Worcester's New York–Providence–Boston. Portland, too, now of course, with the drugs expanding that market. They do import talent from other families, other jurisdictions, now and then, if for some reason or another there just isn't any way that the regular shooter could do the job without getting caught. But it's unusual, and besides, nothing like that happened while I was assigned out there.

“So: No, I don't think he actually knew who I was, the minute he saw me get out of the car and start toward the door. But he knew
what
I was and what I looked like, some kind of a cop or other, and since that's all that really concerns him about anyone he sees around
him a lot and doesn't know, that was the only important thing anyway. So once he got that taken care of, he could sort of melt back into the stream of people moving around inside there, sitting down, handicapping, having their coffee or something. Make himself as inconspicuous as he could, watch me watching him for a while.

“He wasn't standing at the entrance when I went in and bought my grandstand ticket. I didn't actually see him again, in fact, until after I came out of the men's room and spotted him down by the automated betting machines. He had a gray-blue down-vest on over a red plaid flannel shirt, some kind of dark wool pants, new-looking tan work boots. He was looking straight toward the men's room exit and talking to another guy. Soon's he saw me he nodded toward me and said something—‘That's him there now,' most likely, or: ‘That guy in the tweed sportcoat that just pissed down his leg, I hope.' Something along that line.

“The other guy, he was wearing a blue blazer, tan pants, pink dress-shirt, striped tie. Slim, one-forty, maybe; five nine or five ten; forty-five or so; wavy, prematurely-grey hair, originally black; all very dapper and clean-cut, you know? Plays a lot of golf, I think. Cheats on his wife now and then, but nothing
excessive.
Only when he's out of town, and then only if she's a married woman who's got something to lose too. One of those Smilin' Jacks that always looks like the reason he never takes a seat on at the Ten-o'clock Sundays is because by staying on his feet he's always all ready to grab one of those long-handled baskets lined up against the wall at the rear of the church, before anybody else can jump up and get it, and smile at everybody when he helps take up the collection. Or: he can't wait 'til he comes across his next old-lady-on-a-street-corner, so he can help her cross the street, and maybe also give her a little free advice that'll help to ease her mind some and maybe get her to come in and have him draw up a new will for her—naming himself her executor, of course; one will, but at least two fees.