Cover of Night (6 page)

He had read about the old muzzle-loading rifles, so he figured his bomb would follow the same premise, except he hadn’t been exactly certain what went where. He’d packed the tin can with toilet paper, tiny gravel, and the gunpowder, then twisted a length of thread together and soaked it with rubbing alcohol to make his fuse. To keep the floor from burning, he set his “bomb” on a cookie sheet—and as a finishing touch, he took his old fishbowl and turned it upside down over the can, with one side of the bowl propped up just a little bit so the thread could run under the rim and up to the can. His thinking had been that the bowl would contain everything and he’d get the noise and flash without having to clean up a mess.

Not.

The one good thing Patrick had done was to take cover behind his bed after lighting the fuse.

With a loud bang the fishbowl shattered, sending glass and gravel flying around the room. The wad of toilet paper, having caught on fire, disintegrated into small flaming pieces that floated down to cover the bed, the carpet, even getting inside the open door of Patrick’s closet. When his parents burst through the door, Patrick was busily stamping out sparks on the carpet and trying to put out the nice little flame spreading on his bedspread by spitting on it.

It hadn’t been funny at the time, but now Cate and Sheila looked at each other and burst into laughter.

“I’m afraid that’s what I have to look forward to,” Cate said, torn between amusement and horror. “Times two.”

“Maybe not,” Sheila said, a trifle dubiously. “If there’s any justice in the world, though, Patrick will have four kids who are just like him. My dearest wish is that he’ll call me in the middle of the night because his kids have done something horrendous and he’ll
sob
while he apologizes from the bottom of his heart.”

“But poor Andie will have to suffer, too.”

“Well, I do love Andie, but this is about
justice.
If she has to suffer, too, my conscience will hold up under the burden.”

Cate snorted with laughter as she sprayed the muffin pans with butter-flavored nonstick spray, and then began spooning batter into the cups. She adored her mother; she was strong-willed, a bit irascible, and she loved her family to distraction while letting her children get away with nothing. A line Cate fully intended to use on the twins when they were older was one she’d heard her mother shout at Patrick after listening to him whine for an hour because he had to mow the lawn:
“Do you think I carried you for nine months and suffered through thirty-six hours of agonizing labor to bring you into this world so you could sit on your butt? Get out there and mow that lawn! That’s what I had you for!”

Sheer genius.

After another hesitation, Sheila said, “There’s something I want to talk to you about, let you think on it while I’m here.”

That sounded ominous. Her mother
looked
ominous. Cate felt an automatic tightening in her stomach. “Is something wrong, Mom? Is Dad sick? Are
you
sick? Oh, my God, you aren’t getting divorced, are you?”

Sheila stared at her, eyes wide, then in tones of awe said, “Good God, I’ve raised a pessimist.”

Cate’s cheeks flushed. “I’m not a pessimist, but the way you said it, as if something is wrong—”

“Nothing’s wrong, I promise.” She took a sip of coffee. “It’s just that your dad and I would like to have the boys come home with me for a visit, since he hasn’t seen them since Christmas. They’re old enough now, don’t you think?”

Played.
Cate rolled her eyes. “You did that on purpose.”

“Did what on purpose?”

“Made me think something terrible was wrong”—she held up her hand to halt her mother’s protest—“not by what you said but how you said it, and your expression. Then, by comparison to all the horrible things I thought, the idea of the boys going home with you would seem minor. Harmless. Mom, I know how you operate. I took notes, because I intend to use the same tactics on the boys.”

She took a breath. “It wasn’t necessary. I’m not categorically against the idea. I’m not crazy about it, either, but I’ll think about it. How long did you have in mind?”

“Two weeks seems reasonable, considering how difficult the trip is.”

Let the negotiations begin. Cate recognized that ploy, too. Sheila probably wanted a week with the boys, and to make sure she got it, she was asking for twice that. It might teach her a lesson if Cate sweetly agreed to the two weeks. Fourteen days of unrelieved supervision of rowdy four-year-old twins could break even the strongest person.

“I’ll think about it,” she said, refusing to be drawn into a discussion about the length of the visit when she hadn’t yet agreed to let the boys go. If she didn’t stay on her toes, Sheila would have her so tied up in the details that the boys would be in Seattle before Cate realized she hadn’t said “yes.”

“Your dad and I will pay for their plane tickets, of course,” Sheila continued persuasively.

“I’ll think about it,” Cate repeated.

“You need a little break, yourself. Taking care of this place and those two little hooligans doesn’t give you much time for yourself. You could get your hair cut, get a manicure, pedicure…”

“I’ll think about it.”

Sheila huffed out a breath. “We really need to iron out the details.”

“There’ll be plenty of time for that later…
if
I decide they can go. You might as well give up, because I’m not committing myself until I think about it for more than the two minutes you’ve given me.” Just for a second, though, she thought longingly of the hair salon in Seattle she had used. It had been so long since she’d had her hair done that she no longer had a recognizable style. Today, her wavy brown hair was simply pulled back and secured by a large tortoiseshell clip at the back of her neck. Her fingernails were short and bare, because that was the most practical way to keep them given how much her hands were in dough, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d painted her toenails. Just about the only extra grooming she had time for these days was keeping her legs and underarms shaved, which she did because—well, just because. Besides, all it took was an an extra three minutes in the shower.

The boys were so excited about their Mimi visiting that they came thundering downstairs in their pajamas a full half hour before their usual time. Sherry had just arrived, three customers followed her in, and Cate was glad to hand the boys off to her mother to entertain and feed them their breakfast. Her own breakfast was one of the muffins, which she snatched a bite of whenever she could.

It was a beautiful day, the early September air crisp and clear, and it seemed as if almost every inhabitant of Trail Stop came in that morning. Even Neenah Dase, a former nun who, for reasons of her own, had left her order and now owned and operated the small feed store—which meant she was Mr. Harris’s landlady, since he lived in the tiny apartment over the store—came in for a muffin. Neenah was a quiet, self-possessed woman in her mid-forties and one of Cate’s favorite people in Trail Stop. They didn’t often have a chance to chat, and this morning was no different, because they each had a business to run. With a wave and a cheerful hello, Neenah was out the door and gone.

What with one thing and another, it was after
one o’clock
before Cate had a chance to get upstairs. Her mother was still keeping the boys occupied so Cate could get things ready for the guests coming in that afternoon. Mr. Layton still had neither returned nor called, and she was now as much worried as she was annoyed. Had he had an accident? The gravel road could be treacherous if an inexperienced driver took one of the mountain curves too fast. He had been gone for over twenty-four hours without word.

She made a swift decision and went to her room, where she called the county sheriff’s department and after a brief hold was transferred to an investigator. “This is Cate Nightingale in Trail Stop. I own the bed-and-breakfast here, and one of my guests left yesterday morning and hasn’t returned. All of his things are still here.”

“Do you know where he was going?” the county investigator asked.

“No.” She thought back to the morning before, when she’d seen him step back from the dining room door. “He left sometime between eight and ten. I didn’t talk to him. But he hasn’t called and he was supposed to check out yesterday morning. I’m afraid he might have had an accident.”

The investigator took down Mr. Layton’s name and description, and when he asked for the car’s license plate number, Cate went downstairs to her office to pull the paperwork. The investigator, like her, thought Mr. Layton might have had an accident and said he would first check the local hospital and would get back to her later that afternoon.

She had to be satisfied with that. Going back upstairs, she went into Mr. Layton’s room and looked around to see if he’d left any clue as to where he might have gone. The top of the dresser in room 3 was bare except for some small change scattered across the polished surface. A change of clothes was hanging in the closet, and the open suitcase on the luggage stand revealed underwear and socks, a small plastic shopping bag from Wal-Mart with the handles tied in a knot, a bottle of aspirin, and a silk tie rolled up. She wanted to look in the shopping bag, but was afraid the county investigator would disapprove. What if Mr. Layton had been the victim of a crime? Cate didn’t want to leave her fingerprints on his things.

In the small attached bathroom, a disposable razor and a can of shaving cream lay on the edge of the sink, and a can of spray deodorant sat next to the cold-water handle. An open Dopp Kit sat on the back of the toilet, and inside it she could see a hairbrush, a tube of toothpaste, and a toothbrush holder, as well as a few loose Band-Aids.

There was nothing here of value that she could see, but people tended to cling to their things. If he’d left all this behind, surely he’d intended to return. On the other hand, he
had
climbed out the window, for all the world as if he’d been escaping instead of simply leaving.

Maybe that was it. Maybe he wasn’t simply nuts. Maybe he’d escaped.

The question was: from what? Or whom?

 

4

YUELL FAULKNER CONSIDERED HIMSELF, FIRST AND FOREMOST, a businessman. He was in operation to make money, and since he gained clients by word of mouth, he couldn’t afford screwups. His reputation on the street was that he got the job done…whatever the “job” was, efficiently and without fuss.

Some jobs he refused outright, for a variety of reasons. Number one on his list was that he didn’t take any job that had a high probability of bringing the Feds swarming down on him. That meant for the most part he stayed away from politics, and he tried never to do anything that would make national news. The real trick was to do a newsworthy job but pull it off so slickly that it was passed off as an accident.

With that in mind, the first thing he did when receiving a job offer was research it thoroughly. Sometimes clients weren’t entirely truthful when presenting an offer—fancy that. It wasn’t as if he dealt with people of pristine character. So he always double-checked the information he’d been given, and then would decide whether or not to take the job. He tried to never let his ego enter into the decision, never let the adrenaline rush of finessing a difficult situation sway him. Yeah, he could take all the hot jobs and pit his brains and organizing skill against the odds, but the reason the casinos in Vegas didn’t go bust playing the odds was that the long shot usually didn’t win. He wasn’t in business to gratify his ego; he was in business to make money.

He also wanted to stay alive.

When he walked into Salazar Bandini’s office, he knew he’d have to take this job, no matter what it was, or he wouldn’t be walking out.

He knew about Salazar Bandini, or as much as anyone did. Yuell knew that wasn’t the man’s real name, but where he’d come from before arriving on the

Chicago street

scene and adopting that name was up in the air.
Bandini
was an Italian name;
Salazar
wasn’t. And the man sitting behind the desk looked maybe Slavic, maybe German. Hell, maybe even Russian, with those broad cheekbones and prominent brow ridges. Bandini had pale hair, of a thinness that allowed pink scalp to show through, and brown eyes as soulless as a shark’s.

Bandini leaned back in his chair and didn’t invite Yuell to sit down. “You’re very expensive,” he remarked. “You think highly of yourself.”

There wasn’t anything to be said to that, because it was true. And whatever Bandini wanted, he wanted it badly, or he wouldn’t have summoned Yuell past the barricades, both human and electronic, that surrounded him. Based on that, Yuell had to assume his price wasn’t too high; in fact, maybe he should increase his fees.

After a long minute in which Yuell waited for Bandini to tell him why his services were needed, and Bandini waited for Yuell to betray any hint of nerves—which wasn’t going to happen—Bandini said, “Sit.”

Instead, Yuell leaned over the desk, took a pen from the expensive set beside the phone, and looked for a piece of paper. The polished expanse was clear. He lifted his eyebrows at Bandini, and without expression, the other man opened a drawer and drew out a legal pad, which he pushed across to Yuell.

Yuell tore off a sheet of paper and pushed the pad back across to Bandini. On the single sheet Yuell wrote:
Has the room been swept for bugs?

He hadn’t yet said a word, hadn’t been identified by name, but caution was a good thing. The FBI had to have at least tried to get a wire in here, as well as tap the phones. Someone might be camped in a room across the street with a supersensitive parabolic microphone aimed at the window. The lengths to which the Feds would have gone depended on how large Bandini loomed on their radar. If they’d heard even half of what was said on the street, then Bandini was the size of an aircraft carrier.

“This morning,” Bandini said, looking grimly amused. “By myself.”

Which meant that even though Bandini had any number of people in his employ who could have done the chore, he didn’t trust any of them not to betray him.