Flood (2 page)

2

I PUT IN a quick call to Mama Wong at the Poontang Gardens (she had serviced the military at Fort Bragg during the Korean War) to see if I had any messages. I do her favors occasionally and she answers the pay phone in her kitchen with “Mr. Burke’s office” anytime it rings. I don’t get a lot of messages, and her favors aren’t any too tough either.

“Mama, this is Burke. Any calls?”

“You have one call, from a Mr. James. I tell him you would be back later, but he wouldn’t leave a number. He say he call back, okay?”

“Sure. When he calls back, tell him I’m out on assignment and if he can’t leave a number, I won’t be able to talk to him for another week or so.”

“Burke, you not call him back, okay? This is a bad man.”

“How can you tell from his voice, for chrissakes?”

“I know. I hear his kind of voice years ago from a man who say he is a soldier but is really something else, okay?”

“Okay, Mama. But if he wants to find me bad enough he will, right? So take the number and let me call him.”

“Not good idea, Burke. But I do it if you say, okay?”

“Okay, Mama. I’ll call you later.”

I got a small piece of steak out of the fridge and called Pansy over. As soon as she saw the steak, she started drooling quarts and came over to sit next to me, watching carefully. I draped the steak over her massive snout and she sat there looking miserable but not moving. After a couple of minutes I looked at her and said “Speak!” and she snatched the steak so fast I hardly saw her jaws move. Pansy won’t eat anything unless she hears me say the magic word. It’s not a party trick—no weasel is going to poison my dog. I don’t use the usual poison-proofing words the dog trainers favor, like “good food” or “kosher”, because I don’t figure any freak who wants to take her out of the play will ask her to speak when he hands over the food. And if you try to feed her without saying the word, you get to
be
the food.

Pansy looked pleadingly at me. “I told you a thousand times,
chew
the goddamned food. If you swallow it whole, you don’t get the benefit from it. Now try and
chew
it this time, dummy.” And I tossed her another slab of steak, saying “Speak!” while it was still in the air. Pansy snarfed that one down too, realized that was all, and rolled back to her place on the rug.

I sat down in front of the mirror and began my breathing exercises. I started them years ago while my face was healing from the repairs. Now I do them sometimes just to help me think. An old man once taught me how to move pain around in my body until I had gathered it in one spot and could then move it entirely outside my skin. It was all in the breathing, and I’ve kept up the exercises ever since. You suck in a heavy gulp of air smoothly through the nose and down into the stomach, expanding it as far as possible and holding for a slow count of thirty. Then you gradually let it out, pulling in the stomach and expanding the chest. I did this twenty times, concentrating my focus on a red dot I had painted on the mirror. When I climbed into the red dot, the room went away and I was free to think about the girl and her problem. I went down every corridor I could open and came up empty. When I climbed out I heard Pansy snoring away, probably dreaming of a nice crunchy thigh bone. I left her where she was, locked the place up, and went downstairs to the garage.

The garage is actually the first floor of my building, with a sliding door opening into a narrow alley. The best part of it is that I can get to it from inside the building, so I can drive the car into the garage and then just disappear. Someone once followed me all the way to the garage when I was hurt and not paying attention. He just sat there and patiently waited for about six hours. The guy was a real professional. Devil (my old Doberman) took him just as he was making a deposit into an empty Coke bottle he carried with him. Turned out later he knew how to play the game—he never gave any information about me to the cops from his hospital bed. Just some tracker who should have done his work on the telephone.

I climbed into the Plymouth carefully. It can look like a lot of different cars, but I had last used it as a gypsy cab and it was still an ungodly mess inside. I lifted the steel plate next to the transmission hump, found the set screws, removed them, and took out the little five-shot Colt Cobra I keep there. Checked the cylinder, emptied the piece, and pocketed it. I thought it would be best to have a friend with me until I had a better idea of what this woman wanted. I screwed the car’s floor back together, climbed out, and went back upstairs.

While I sat waiting for the mysterious lady to return, I went through my latest issue of
Hoofbeats,
daydreaming about the magnificent yearling I’d own someday. Maybe an Albatross colt out of a Bret Hanover mare, a lovely free-legged pacer eligible for all the big-stakes races. I’d name him Survivor, win a fortune, and be rich and respectable the rest of my natural life. I love animals—they don’t do the things people do unless they absolutely have to, and even then it’s never for fun. Sometimes I’d see the name of a yearling for sale in the magazine and I’d say his name softly to myself and feel like I used to feel in the institution when I was a kid—like I’d never have anything good. But that feeling never lasts.

People won’t let you live the way you want to, but if you’re strong enough or quick enough, at least you don’t have to live the way they want you to. I live, though, no matter what.

The downstairs buzzer bit into my thoughts. I had my secretary answer and sure enough, it was the lady again. Even though I figured she was just coming up with my money, I went backstage and monitored her progress up to the door again. Force of habit.

She walked in wearing the same outfit, so she probably did go to a bank. If she’d gone home to pick up the cash, she would have changed her clothes, at least a little bit. Not all women are like that, I know, but this one seemed to be. The only difference was that the pale lipstick had been replaced with a heavy dark shade. She tossed a thick wad on my desk, wrapped in rubber bands. Just like the gangsters.

“I thought you’d rather have small bills,” she said.

“The bank won’t care,” I replied. She gave me a crooked smile that told me maybe she didn’t just select me at random. “Don’t you want to count it?” she asked.

“That’s all right; I’m sure it’s all there.” Holding it in my hand, I was sure it was. I took out a yellow legal pad, my imitation silver ballpoint, and began the interview. “Who are you looking for?”

“Martin Howard Wilson.”

“Any a.k.a.’s?”

“What?”

“Also Known As . . . an alias, you know.”

“Well, he used to be called Marty, if that’s what you mean. And he calls himself the Cobra.”

“The what?”

“The Cobra, like the snake.”

“I know what a cobra is. That’s his name?”

“It’s not his name, it’s what he calls himself.”

“Does anyone else call him that?”

She laughed. “Not hardly,” and she folded her hands across her knees again. I picked up the faint bluish tinge on the knuckles more clearly this time.

“What does this Cobra do?”

“A lot of things. He tells people he’s a Vietnam veteran. He studies what he thinks is karate. He believes he’s a professional soldier. And he rapes children.”

“You seem to know a lot about him.”

“I know everything I need to know about him except where he is.”

“Got a last known address?”

“Yes, he was living in a furnished room on Eighth Avenue just off the northeast corner of Thirty-seventh Street.”

“How long ago did he leave?”

“He left last night.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I just missed him.”

“Didn’t you ask where he’d gone?”

Another short laugh. “The circumstances made that impossible, Mr. Burke.”

“Can you be a little more specific?”

“I had to be forceful with the superintendent.”

“A bit
more
specific . . . ?”

“He tried to put his hands on me and I kicked him.”

“So?”

“I don’t mean kick like
you
would mean it, Mr. Burke. He’ll have to go to the hospital.”

And then I remembered where I’d seen those bluish knuckles before—on the hands of the elderly kung fu instructor who had taught me how to breathe. “What style do you study?”

Her eyes went flat. “I study no style. For the last several years I have been my own teacher. Years before, many different styles. I don’t have a black belt, I don’t break boards, and I don’t fight in gymnasiums.”

Somehow, I already knew that. “You seem like you’re more than capable of taking care of yourself, Miss . . .”

“Flood.”

“Miss Flood. So what do you need me for?”

“Mr. Burke, I did not come to you for protection, but for information. I understand you have sources of information which would be closed to me. I am a person of honor. I need a service, and I am prepared to pay for that service.”

“Look, I don’t get it. No offense meant, okay? But the first time you come in here you talk like an Eighth Avenue hooker, and now you come on like Fu Manchu. I think you know some things you haven’t told me. I think you think I know this Cobra you’re looking for. I don’t.”

“Mr. Burke, I know you don’t. But I know you run a service for fools and misfits who think they want to be mercenaries. I know you know the mercenary scene. This person has to leave the country now that he knows I am looking for him, and it would be right in character for him to try and go down the mercenary pipeline. But he’s not mercenary material—he’s a freak, a psychopath. And a stupid loser. So I thought maybe he’d turn up in one of your recruitment files and then I’d have him.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then I’ve paid for a week of your time to find him out there,” a short sweep of her arm indicating the streets outside.

“It could take a lot longer than that to find a guy like you’re looking for. He could be anywhere.”

Her eyes went cold when she looked at me and said, “I only have a week,” but her mouth tightened just enough to show me the truth.

“You only have the grand, right?”

“You are very perceptive, Mr. Burke. I have only one thousand dollars, which I have already given you. It will take a long time for me to come up with that much money again.”

“How come?”

“It’s not important how come. It’s not your business and it won’t help you find this person for me.”

I looked at her a long moment. Her face went flat again; she wouldn’t make the same mistake with her mouth twice. She had lived someplace where an expressionless face was an asset, maybe the same place I lived when I was a kid. I asked her. “You ever do time?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I like to know what I’m working with.”

“So do I, Mr. Burke. And I already satisfied myself about you before I came here. I’m hiring you to do a job, that’s all. I know you’ve done a lot of jobs for a lot of people and never asked too many questions. I don’t expect to be treated any differently because I’m a woman.”

“That’s not why I’m asking. It sounds like you’re trying to find this guy so you can cancel his ticket, and I don’t want to get involved with any number like that. This guy’s not registered anyplace. I can’t trace him on the phone or through the mail—I have to go in the street. I can’t be that subtle about it. If I find him, and he turns up dead, people are going to be asking me questions. I can’t answer some of them.”

“There won’t be any questions.”

“I only have your word for that.”

“I always keep my word, Mr. Burke.”

“I don’t know that either. How the hell
would
I know? Give me a name—give me someone to call who’ll vouch for you.”

“There’s nobody in New York—nobody who would talk to you, anyway. You should know about people by now.”

“Look, Miss Flood. I’ve seen some things. I’ve done some things. I’m not stupid but I’m no mind reader. You want a bloodhound, I’ve got to know what you want to do with the man after I turn him up.”

Her white teeth against the heavy dark lipstick denied what might have been a smile. Very chilly. “What if I tell you that I only want to talk to him?”

“Is
that what you’re saying?”

She looked at me carefully, ran the first two fingers of her right hand softly against the underside of her squarish jaw, then cocked her head slightly to one side and looked at me some more. “No.” She stood up. “May I have my money back, please? I don’t believe we can do business.”

She held out her hand, palm up. The other hand curled into a tight fist, held just in front of her waist. With legs slightly spread, she shifted her weight below her hips. The gun was in the desk drawer—no contest. I put the money in her hand and she stepped backward, brought both her hands together, bowed slightly and stepped back again. She opened both hands and spread them in front of me, like she was asking for something. The money had disappeared. The office was quiet. I looked to my right, and saw Pansy on her feet—a low growl, almost like a purr, came from deep in her chest but she didn’t move. I threw a switch on the desk and the door behind Flood locked with an audible
click.
Flood looked from the dog to me. I took out the pistol slowly and carefully and held it on the desk. I spoke softly, spacing the words.

“Listen to me. I am going to say something to the dog. It will
not
be an attack signal, no matter what it sounds like. Don’t do anything stupid, because I’m not going to. Just listen to me, please. You can’t do anything to me here. This is my place—I survive here. I am not trying to scare you or make you do anything foolish. I know you want to leave, and you’re going to. I’m not your enemy. I just want you to understand that you can’t come back. Don’t be stupid, and don’t get stupid ideas. When I say something to the dog, she’ll lie down. Then I’ll throw this switch, and the door will unlock. When I put the gun down on the desk, you open the door, go downstairs, leave here, and don’t come back. Do you understand?”

She didn’t change expression. “I understand.”

I looked over at Pansy—the hair on the back of her neck was standing straight up. “Pansy, jump!” and she immediately hit the deck like she’d been crushed with a hydraulic press. I threw the switch and Flood could hear the door unlock behind her. I cocked the pistol and laid it gently on the desk, the barrel facing her. I looked at Flood and bowed my head slightly as she had done. Without a word, she turned her back and walked toward the door. The roll of her hips looked deadly, not friendly this time. She closed the door behind her softly without looking back.