The Blonde (13 page)

Now the cops had finally arrived. Showtime. Red and blue lights danced across the walls of the lobby. If the lobby lights had been dimmed, it would have looked like Disco Night at the Sheraton.

Jack got ready. All he needed was a cab to be outside those doors. This was a hotel. And sure, it was three o’clock in the morning, but cabs flocked to hotels like iron fillings to a magnet, right? Once he was in a cab, he could get to the airport. There were a lot of people in airports, no matter what time of day. He could feign an illness, get a security escort. Hang with that person the whole time. Buy a flight to D.C. He could use the home-equity credit card. They’d always kept that for emergencies, and Theresa hadn’t closed out the account yet. If this didn’t qualify for emergency, he didn’t know what would.

In D.C., he’d go to the FBI. The CIA. Homeland Security. Whoever. Someone who would listen to his story, then dispatch somebody to the Westin Horton Plaza in San Diego and verify everything.

Somebody in the government had to be around at this time of the morning.

All he had to do was get into a cab, and he would have a chance to breathe again, and think this through a bit more. But D.C. still seemed like the right move.

There. A flash of dark yellow and black in a checkerboard pattern.

Go, go, go
.

Slip past the bustle. Pray no one paid him any mind. Quick glance at Charles Lee Vincent: busy with an EMT chick. Laughing about something, probably a dumb joke to break the tension. Yeah, laugh it up. You’re not the ones whose brains could explode at any given moment. Out the door, from the air-conditioned cool into the damp summer night. The cab, dead ahead.

Jack reached around to pat his butt cheek; his wallet was still there.

Funny if he didn’t have that, huh? He could go back and tell Charles Lee Vincent all about it: You’re never going to believe what I forgot up in my room. Har har har …

The cab rocketed away.

Fuck almighty. Was there even a passenger in the backseat? No, not that Jack could tell. Did he get a sudden call? Or had someone called ahead and said, “Hey, let’s screw with Jack Eisley’s life a little more”?

Jack found himself standing alone on the sidewalk as the seconds ticked away.

He scanned the sidewalk to his right, along the side of the hotel and up the length of Rittenhouse Square: no one. Then to his left. There. A couple, walking away from him, arms intertwined.

Go back inside, or race forward?

Forward
.

Jack jogged, then power-walked, then tried to feign a normal pace. It didn’t work. The taller one of the two, a woman, looked behind nervously. Jack blew air through his mouth, then offered a sheepish grin. The woman turned back and hurried the pace a bit. That grin wasn’t fooling anybody. Jack now saw that her companion, the shorter one, curly brunette hair, was also female. Both were young. They must be walking home together after a night out clubbing, he figured, or whatever it is young women do in Philadelphia late on a Thursday night.

Ten feet. How far was ten feet?

So damned tough to judge. How long was a car? About ten feet? Did he need to keep a car length’s pace behind these girls?

His head throbbed.

The women looked at each other; one whispered and the other nodded. The curly-haired girl appeared to be rooting around in her purse for something.
Christ, they think Fm a mugger
. Then again, why wouldn’t they think that?

Down the street, rushing toward them beneath the mercury vapor lights, was salvation: another cab.

The taller nudged her companion to the right, shot her hand high in the air. High beams flashed and the cab swerved to the left, increasing speed. Jack ran forward, almost pushing the women aside. The cab must have thought he was going to race right into its path, because it braked hard.

The throbbing in his head worsened.

Fingers hooked under the door handle. It was greasy.

“Hey! Fucking asshole!”

“Medical emergency,” Jack muttered, and yanked open the door.

“Sir, those girls hailed me first.”

“I don’t care. Just drive.”

Jack slid across the seat and slammed the door shut. Then he
autolocked the back door. The taller girl, whose eye shadow was eerily dark, and lipstick unearthly white, pounded on the window, shouted, “Asshole!”

The cabbie turned around and regarded him carefully. “Wait. I know you. You’re the guy who puked in my cab before.”

“Could you please just drive? I have plenty of money.”

“You’re not feeling sick again, are you?”

Another pound, one that shook the cab. “Motherfucker!”

And a tug at the door.

“I didn’t puke in your cab. We pulled over, remember?”

Jack saw that the curly-haired girl was walking around the back of the cab, headed for the other door. He reached across and locked that door, too.

“God, you’re a dick. This is no way to treat women.”

“Fifty bucks just to drive away.
Now
.”

Angry slapping on the other door now. One slapper, one pounder—these girls made quite a team. Pretty soon, the tall one would peel back the roof of the cab and reach down for Jack, opening her jaws wide, endless rows of teeth …

“Just fucking go. It’s life-and-death.”

The cabbie shifted his vehicle to drive and gave a short burst of horn. Both girls jumped back, a bit startled. The cab lurched forward, the engine coughed, and then the driver continued up Eighteenth Street.

“Okay, Life and Death. Where do you want to go?”

“The airport.”

“Again?”

“Fuck the flat rate. Charge me whatever you want. I need to get to the airport.”

“Well, here’s the sad thing. I’m not going anywhere near the airport. I’m off duty.”

“What do you mean? You just picked me up.”

“You notice the meter’s off? I thought I was going to pick up
those two ladies back there. Odds are, they were headed somewhere in Center City. I thought I’d make a last buck before punching out.”

“I need to get to the airport as fast as I can.”

“I would, but I got an errand to run. There’s a package that needs to make it to a friend of mine at Fourth and Spring Garden. That’s not on the way to the airport.”

“I’m desperate.”

“I can see that. You’ve had a night, haven’t you?”

“Please. I just need a ride to the airport.”

“Tell you what. Indulge me for a few minutes, and I think we can work something out.”

Jack rested back into the seat. Whatever. He’d been indulging people all evening. Why not a cabdriver?

“Only a few minutes?”

“Not even. Say, you’re not a Mormon or anything, are you?”

Little Pete’s

I
t was too soon for another breakfast. Worse yet, he was alone this time. Ed’s head was tucked away behind the front desk of the Sheraton. Least Ed had company—plenty of cops and rescue workers and hotel staff—buzzing around him. Not Kowalski. He was totally and utterly alone, sitting at a table recently wiped down by a stocky Slavic woman with at least three hairs growing out of a mole on her chin. Good smile, though. So there’s her.

Kowalski spun his cell phone on the tabletop and stopped it with a single index finger. It landed on the number one. He held it there; the phone speed-dialed.

This is Katie. Leave a message and Til get back to you as soon as I can
.

No jokes, no cutesy voice. That was Katie. Businesslike in every way except the important ones.

It had been months now, but he hadn’t called to cancel the voice-mail service from her local phone provider. She had no other relatives—her half-brother was out of the picture—so there was nobody else to cancel it for her. Kowalski kept it going just to hear her voice. Seventeen words. That’s all he had left. Every week, he called the access number to erase all of the hang-up calls. He was the only one who called her phone number anymore. Sometimes, he’d hang on the line, and he’d hear his own sigh. He hadn’t known he sighed till then. He’d always thought he had better control than that.

The phone on the tabletop vibrated. It looked like a hovercraft, gliding over a sea of Formica.

Kowalski answered it.

His handler.

“How close are you? I have someone coming in to meet you in a little over an hour.”

“You should run out to the Seven-Eleven, get a Yoo-hoo and a couple doughnuts for your guest. It’s going to be awhile. Our girl’s out of the picture for a bit.”

Kowalski expected a quick rejoinder; that was his handler’s style. Their conversations were like cutthroat racquetball. Bat one right at her head, she’d return the serve and there’d be a hard little explosion in your nuts.

This time, though, nothing.

“You’re there, right?”

“Define ‘out of the picture.’ ”

“Taken to the hospital. Something was wrong with her—she was bleeding from her nose and mouth. But still breathing.”

Kowalski might have been imagining things—it was late—but he thought he heard his handler gasp. He tried to assure her.

“Give me a few hours, I’ll recover her, dead or alive, and bring the matching set down to you. Okay?”

“That’s not what I had in mind. Hold, please.”

Kowalski held. Holding, no big deal. That was his thing. Hang out, endure the boredom, tempered by the thought that soon, oh so soon, the fun would start. The brief hot burst of joy: the weight of his finger on a trigger, the quick flash of a man’s brains exploding out of an artfully executed shot. Nobody had picked up on the pattern yet, which partially delighted him, partially depressed him. If they were to take X rays of all of the skulls of the wise guys he’d killed over the past months, and laid them all on top of one another, they’d see that the entry holes formed a particular letter of the alphabet. Even the occasional
Sesame Street
viewer would see it. What starts with the letter
K?

Katie
.

Kowalski
.

She used to joke about keeping her maiden name. Katie Kowalski? Sounded like a cheerleader. He’d call her “Special K,” and make faces at her and short bus jokes, and she’d slap him—kind of hard, come to think of it—and …

“Your services are no longer required.”

“Really.”

“Good night.”

“Wait… you’re serious? Come on. I can still deliver what you want.”

“No, you can’t.”

So true on so many levels.

And that was the end of their relationship.

On the Way to Spring Garden Street

A
ll the way up Eighteenth, speeding past construction sites and office towers and a giant cathedral and more construction sites and an underground expressway and row homes and then a left onto Spring Garden. Jack remembered the name of the street from the foldout map of Philly he’d purchased at O’Hare. Center City’s northernmost boundary was Spring Garden Street. It sounded so pleasant on the map. But it didn’t look like spring up here, and there certainly weren’t any gardens. As the street numbers ticked down, everything looked increasingly industrial, as if civic leaders had simply thrown up their hands and said, “Well, it’s not Center City anymore, build whatever the hell you want.”

Eventually, the cab made its way to Third Street, hung a left, then turned into a shadowy alley. Jack didn’t see a bar or a store or anything.

“What is this?”

“Best Sybian club in town, my friend.”

“Best what?”

“Hang tight. Let me run this package upstairs; then I’ll be back and I can take you down to the airport.”

Alarm bells.

“No. Let me go with you.”

The cabdriver hooked an arm around his seat and looked at Jack. “Best what, huh.”

“I won’t say a word. Let me go up with you.”

“If it were up to me, that’d be fine. But it’s a private club. I can’t take you up there.”

Of all of the random cabs he could have jumped into, Jack had to pick the one with a guy who doubled as a deliveryman for a Sybian club. Whatever the hell that was.
Sybia
. One of the former Soviet republics, maybe? The driver didn’t have a Russian accent.
Was this a Russian mob joint? The driver turned off the ignition, and what little air-conditioning had been circulating in the car stopped.

“Crack open your door for air. I’ll be back in a sec and—”

“No! Please!”

Jack opened his door and scrambled out of the backseat.

“Come on, chief. Don’t make this weird.”

“I’ll pay you.”

“It’s not about the money. The people in this club wouldn’t appreciate it. They wouldn’t even like me talking about it, for Christ’s sake.”

“Name your price.”

Jack meant it. There was enough on the home-equity card to cover whatever this guy had in mind. All for a ride to the airport. He took out his wallet from his back pocket to make sure the driver knew he was serious. There wasn’t much cash left, but they could go to an ATM. A drive-thru. It’d have to be a drive-thru. Get a cash advance from his equity card.

The driver waited. He was considering it, obviously, but wanted Jack to throw out the first bid.

His wallet open, Jack looked down and saw her. Behind the laminate: a photo of his girl, Callie, playing inside a giant wooden airplane at their favorite playground. The smile on her face reassured him: Yes, this was all worth it. You want your daughter to grow up knowing a father, don’t you?

Jack threw out a price.

The driver recoiled as if he’d tasted something rotten, so Jack threw out another one. This didn’t offend the driver as much. But it took a third one to seal the deal.

Little Pete’s

K
owalski found everything he needed at Little Pete’s. He’d asked to use the bathroom, knowing it had to be in the back, near the lockers and storage closet.

Changing your appearance doesn’t require Lon Chaney-style theatrics. No hooks and wires, pinning your nose upward. At a distance, people recognize you by identifying characteristics like hair, physique, gait, clothing, and accessories. Facial recognition is secondary, at best. Want make sure someone doesn’t recognize you? Simply change as many identifying characteristics as you can.