Simple Simon (25 page)

Hunt and Peck

A two year old Dodge pickup was Rothchild’s car of choice, though it wasn’t registered to him, or to anyone that actually existed for that matter. It was registered to a name. A silly name.
How far one could get on a string of letters
, he often thought.

In the afternoon, as the workday ended, and with the weekend just one more day away, Rothchild left his subterranean lair with a satisfaction that buoyed his step and actually made him smile at the main lobby receptionist and found his clean black pickup waiting in the close lot where he always parked it. He climbed in, started the throaty engine, and backed into the traffic aisle without looking. If he hit something, so what? Today was a day not for worries. It was a day to mark in his mental record books. His biggest challenge completed. His biggest scheme brought to a successful end.

There was a bottle of champagne he’d saved for something like this, he remembered as he moved past the guard posts, through the serpentine drive, and onto the roads of Fort Meade. Yes, a bottle of bubbly, as the ever so cosmopolitan characters in the movies used to call it. Bubbly and a babe. He had the former. The latter he could rent.

Leaving Meade proper, he thought of what kind of babe he’d like this night. One of the top heavy ones for some raucous titty fucking, or an A cup waif who he could maneuver around the bed like some female Gumby doll.

Choices, choices. Maybe both. Yeah. Both. He could handle that, and he could certainly arrange it.

Driving with one hand draped over the top of the steering wheel, Rothchild lost himself in a daydream of the possibilities, thinking of little else, and never noticing the four cars that took turns tailing him both back and front.

*  *  *

It was an old Royal that he’d dug out of a storage closet, something so archaic that he was surprised it was even allowed in the Chocolate Box. But it was, the glorious old machine that Brad Folger placed on the blotter on his desk after locking his door.

He drew a breath in, held it, and rolled a sheet of paper into the machine, exhaling as he pecked at the sticky keys with one finger of each hand. Yes, it was old, it was slow, it was an implement of inefficiency. But there was one thing it had over its modern counterparts: a total lack of wires.

Brad Folger wanted this last bit of information to be available to no one, until the time came. When he finished he put it in an envelope with instructions, and wrote Pedanski’s name on the outside.

It was not a suicide note. At least not his.

*  *  *

The amazing thing about being where one wasn’t supposed to be was that most people didn’t give a damn who was where as long as no one was making a fuss. Art knew that from years of having to pull information from witnesses like teeth, things that one would think the person must have seen, but, oh well, they didn’t think it too strange the man had a rifle in one hand as he walked down the street.

Getting on the service elevator in the maintenance garage had been exceedingly easy. It was after five, leaving just a few workers milling around, and all the effort it took was putting two hardhats on his and Simon’s heads and waiting until a few backs were turned to the corridor leading to the elevators.

Art never had any illusions about trying for the lobby elevators. They would be crowded with people. People who watched the news and might notice a big black guy and a scrawny white kid together, even if they didn’t match the photos, his from his Bureau file, Simon’s ripped from a frame in his dead parents’ home.

But a couple of hardhats, however odd, would be par for the course in a building where some renovation was being done. Although Simon’s less than macho posture, head dipped, could have drawn a curious eye, it did not. Luck? Timing? Art didn’t care. Once on the elevator, an express to the top twenty floors, he pressed 103 and let out a breath as the doors slid shut.

*  *  *

Trooper Wayne Dupar of the Indiana State Police lit up his rack as he pulled in behind the late model Taurus with three occupants, male it appeared from his vantage, following the vehicle as it glided to a stop on the shoulder of the interstate.

He gave his position to his dispatch center, knowing that if another unit was in the area they would have it do a roll-by as a matter of practice, and left his cruiser to approach the car from the driver’s side, hand on the top of his pistol.

“Gentlemen.” Dupar said. “Good evening.”

Georgie already had the window down, and his wallet out. “Officer. Was I speeding?”
Just give me the ticket. Fast.

Dupar leaned low and looked across the front seat. Ralph looked back at him, smiling casually. In the back seat a stern man sat on the far right, a bag on the seat next to him. Dupar recognized it as a pilot’s bag.
So, planning on doing some flying, are we—

“No, sir, you weren’t speeding, but we had a report of a vehicle matching this one driving recklessly about fifteen miles back that way on the interstate.”

“Reckless?” Georgie repeated with a sprinkling of shock. “I promise you, officer, that wasn’t me.”

“Well,” Dupar drawled, “I’m going to have to satisfy myself about that. I’m going to have to ask you some questions and give you a field sobriety test.” He looked to the other two men. “I’m going to have to give you field sobriety test also, gentlemen.”

“What?” Ralph protested, leaning toward the window.

“It happens that sometimes a passenger was driving, then someone switches off,” Dupar explained in a painfully slow, meticulous cadence. “Like I said, I’m going to have to satisfy myself that you all are all right to be operating a motor vehicle.”

Son of a bitch.
Ralph looked at his watch. Twenty minutes. They had to be at the airfield in twenty minutes. “Officer, can we hurry this up, maybe? We’ve got someplace to be.”

Dupar scratched his square chin, once, twice, three times. “Sir, hurrying causes accidents. I’d hate to see you all hurt in an accident. I’d hate to see that.”
Not…
“I want you to drive away from here alive and in good shape tonight. All right.”

Fine. Fucking fine. Just do it. Do it.
Ralph nodded and sat back in his seat.

Officer Dupar showed rows of bone-white teeth to the driver and asked, pronouncing every syllable as if talking to a foreigner, “Okay, sir. How about we get you done first?”

*  *  *

“What do you think?” the supervising FBI agent asked, showing the hours-old photo to two of his subordinates on the hastily arranged operation. “I think it looks like him.”

The other agents looked to the photo of the man driving the black Dodge pickup, then to an older mug shot of a man named Kirby Gant, a.k.a. Mr. Tag.

“If it ain’t him,” one of the agents commented, “it’s a twin.”

The supervising agent tapped the photos together on the edge of the fold-down desk in the back of the surveillance van and picked up the phone, dialing the number he’d been give.

“Yes?” a voice answered after just one ring.

“Mr. Breem…”

*  *  *

The lobby elevators were good enough for Keiko when she arrived a few minutes after eight, darkness having settled upon the city, and a quietness to the massive building that she found exciting. There was nothing like the shrill edge of a scream ripping an unsuspecting silence to shreds.

She imagined a cry resonating from Jefferson as the elevator began to move. Closed her eyes and made it real in her head.

Her stomach pressing low from the upward rise, the sound playing as if real, she felt a warmth trickle up her thighs and plant itself between her legs. Alone in the elevator, she pressed them together, surprised that thoughts of one so old could excite her.

Maybe pain was pain, and pleasure just pleasure, regardless of age. She would soon know. If so, it would mean a far broader horizon.

Dead No More

There was nothing to which Art could compare this sight. Nothing. As he and Simon walked past sawhorses and the idle tools of carpenters’ labors, and approached the east side windows of the Skydeck Observatory, all the world below seemed to be a sea of undulating white mist that rolled inward from Lake Michigan, lit with a radiance borne of a thousand man-made lights below. And from this sea the Sears Tower rose, a rectangular island of black against a star flecked indigo sky, the moon barely a scythe above.

Simon released his grip on Art’s hand and pressed himself right up to the glass wall, his breaths laying steamy ovals on the surface. His head came up, eyes also, the jitter somehow steadied, and he looked out upon the world high above the world below.

“This is up…” he said, and moved along the floor to ceiling window, hands walking along the glass like a mime searching for an exit from the transparent box that imprisons him. “Up…”

“We’re way up,” Art said in agreement, losing himself in the moment, in Simon’s discovery of another place, maybe another universe altogether as he saw it. However he saw it.

Simon’s head twisted as though he were pressing an ear to the glass, eyes to the ceiling, trying to get the best view possible. “We’re in the sky.”

Art followed along as Simon neared the corner of the stripped room. “What do you see?”

“Simon sees up.”

And what did that mean? Art wondered. Did Simon even know? In the end, did it matter?

“Up,” Simon said once again.

Art put a hand on his back and tipped his wrist to check the time. It was almost nine.

*  *  *

This was the night it would end, and Rothchild was gone. Kudrow had made the trip from the Chocolate Box to Rothchild’s office to monitor developments. But the man who did not exist had gone home for the day, treating it as any other. That might have been appropriate in most cases, but not this one. He should have realized that, Kudrow thought. Damn right he should have.

So back to the Chocolate Box Kudrow went, through checkpoints he had just come in the opposite direction, back to his office and to a small phone book he kept in the safe with the master cipher books for KIWI. In the back of that phone book, on a page with more scribbles than readable text, Kudrow ran his finger to the third phone number from the bottom. It had a line through it like most of the others.

He dialed it standing behind his desk.

“Hello?”

An unseen hand might have reached out and lifted Kudrow’s chin, but it was his own reaction to the strange male voice at the other end of the line.

“Hello? Who’s there?”

Kudrow’s throat constricted involuntarily, lest an errant demand be loosed on the person who had answered Rothchild’s phone.

No one answered Rothchild’s phone but Rothchild. That was the agreement. That was the rule.

“Who the hell is there?”

His breathing might have traveled over the line, and Kudrow thought maybe the thump of his heart as it slammed against the inside of his chest at a pace he could not remember, even during the most grueling treadmill tests he’d been subjected to.

This was a muscle out of control, fed by adrenalin and whatever other chemicals his brain was telling the glands to let loose into his system. This was panic.

“Is anybody there?”

Kudrow laid the phone back into its cradle, keeping his hand on it as if to hold it in place, standing as still as he could, feeling the
bethump bethump bethump bethump
in his chest go on until he thought it might let loose, like an engine that had thrown a rod, ripping a hole right there and letting the blood spurt out against his blazing white shirt.

He wondered if he was having a heart attack, and then he wondered if he should be wishing that it were so.

*  *  *

The supervising FBI agent spun a chair around and sat facing Kirby Gant in his kitchen.

“Can I have something to drink,” Rothchild asked almost meekly, as he remembered doing long ago.

“You got anything?” the agent asked.

“Fruit punch, in the fridge,” Rothchild said, and one of the dozen FBI types in his apartment poured him a glass. He sipped from it, draining half, then set it on the kitchen table. “Thanks.”

The supervising agent nodded. “Now, how is this going to go? Easy or hard?”

Rothchild had already been read his rights. He knew that he could have an attorney present during questioning. And he further knew that no attorney in the land could do for him what he could do for himself.

“Your name is Kirby Gant,” the supervising agent said when no reply came to his question. “Correct?”

Oh, old Kirby. Kirby was dead. Kirby could do Rothchild no good at all. Zero.

“You don’t want to talk to Kirby,” he told the agent. “You want Rothchild.”

Because Rothchild was the one with value, and Rothchild understood the game. Kirby had showed him how to play.

“Rothchild has much more interesting things he can tell you.”

*  *  *

Art looked at his watch again. Nine o’clock sharp. And as if on cue, emerging from the sea of mist as a dragonfly might broach murky water, a helicopter appeared and gained altitude as it neared the Tower.

They’re here
, Art thought, his hand sliding from Simon’s shoulder to his back, where it rubbed soft circles.

Simon caught sight of the helicopter also, and tried to point at it but stubbed his finger into the glass. “It’s coming up.”

“It’s coming,” Art said, knowing what he had to say next. “Those are friends, Simon.”

Friends? How could that be friends? Friends were not that. That was Up. Friends were like Art and Doctor Anne and Doctor Cha
zzz
.

“Come on,” Art said, turning Simon from the window and guiding him back toward the exit from the Skydeck.

The
thrump-thrump-thrump
of the helicopter penetrated the windows as it passed and circled to the north, turning to head back for a landing on the roof. It was a sound that fascinated Simon, requiring Art to keep a firm hand on his back as they weaved between the stacks of construction materials nearer the room’s center.