I sat back against the wall and tried to think. I thought of a lot of things, all of them brilliant, and in the movies one of them would have worked. But this was a bathroom floor in Seattle, and all I was doing here was dying.
Then the front door opened.
‘Hey!’ I yelled. ‘In here!’
Who did I expect to see? Bel, of course. I’d half expected she’d follow me here, once she’d got Spike to the hospital.
‘In here!’ I yelled again.
‘I know where you are, dummy,’ said Hoffer. He stood in the doorway, hands on hips. He was a big bastard, but not as big as he looked on TV. He gave me a good look, like I was a drunk cluttering up the hall of his apartment building. He was deciding whether to kick me or throw me a dime.
He threw me the dime.
Rather, he stepped on the key with the tip of his shoe and slid it closer to me.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘what’s life without a bit of fun? Now I want you to do me a favour.’
‘What?’
He was fumbling in his pocket, and eventually drew out a small camera. ‘Look dead for me.’
‘What?’
‘Play dead. It’s got to convince Walkins, so make it good. The blood looks right, but I need a slumped head, splayed legs, you know the sort of thing I mean.’
I stared at him. Was he playing with me? Hard to tell. His eyes were dark, mostly unfocused. He looked like he could burst into song or tears. He looked a bit confused.
I let my head slump against my chest. He fired off a few shots from different angles, and even clambered up on to the toilet seat to take one. The noise of the camera-motor winding on the film seemed almost laughably incongruous. Here I was bleeding like a pig while someone took snuff photos from a toilet seat.
‘That’s a wrap,’ he said at last. ‘Hey, did I tell you? Joe Draper’s going to make a documentary of my life. Maybe we’ll talk about my charity work, huh?’
‘You’re all heart, Leo.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
He turned to walk away, but then thought of something. He kept his back to me as he spoke.
‘You going to come gunning for me, Mikey?’
‘No,’ I said, not sure if I meant it. ‘I’m finished with that.’ I found to my surprise that I did mean it. He glanced over his shoulder and seemed satisfied.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve done some thinking about that, too. See, I could break your hand up a bit, take the fingers out of the sockets, smash the wrist. But the body has a way of repairing itself.’
‘I swear, Leo, I’m not—’
‘So instead of that, just in case, I’m putting contracts out on your parents. If I buy it, they buy it too.’
‘There’s no need for that.’
‘And your friend Bel, too, same deal. My little insurance policy. It’s not exactly all-claims, but it’ll have to do.’
He made to walk away.
‘Hoffer,’ I said. He stopped. ‘Same question: are you going to come gunning for me?’
‘Not if you stay dead. Get a fucking day job, Mike. Stack shelves or something. Sell burgers. I’m going to tell Walkins I stiffed you. I’m hoping he’ll go for it. I’m losing my best client, but this ought to help.’ He patted his pocket again, where the money was. ‘I may tell a few other people too.’
I smiled. ‘You mean the media.’
‘I’ve got a living to make, Mike. With you dead, I need all the publicity I can get.’
‘Go ahead, Hoffer, shout it from the rooftops.’
‘I’m going.’
And he went. I got the key, but even so it was hell unlocking the cuffs. How did Houdini do it? Maybe if you could dislocate your wrist or something... Eventually I got them off and staggered out of the bathroom, only to fall to my knees in the hallway. I was crawling towards the door when it opened again, very slowly. I saw first one foot, then the other. The feet were dressed in shitkicker cowboy boots.
‘Michael!’ Bel screamed. ‘What happened?’
She took my head in her hands.
‘Got a Band-Aid?’ I asked.
29
Hoffer went back to New York with nine and a half grand in his pocket and Provost’s papers in his case.
He didn’t know if he’d ever do anything with those papers. They were worth something, no doubt about that. But they were dangerous too. You only had to look at the D-MAN to see that.
The press were going to town on the Seattle story. Shoot-out at the home of the Disciples of Love. Hoffer could see there was a lot the authorities weren’t saying. Even so, it didn’t take long for the majority of the bodies to be identified as serving and ex-employees of the security services. The explanation seemed to be that Kline, an embittered ex-employee, had somehow persuaded some serving staff to work for him, and the whole lot of them were involved in some dubious way with the Disciples of Love. Sure, and the tooth fairy lives on West 53rd.
Nobody was mentioning the ten mil or the Middle East.
Hoffer didn’t go to the office for a couple of days, and when he did he thought better of it after half a flight of stairs. After all, heights gave him earache. So he retreated instead to the diner across the street. The place was full of bums nursing never-ending cups of coffee. They’d discovered the secret of life, and they were tired of it. A couple of them nodded at Hoffer as he went in, like he was back where he belonged.
Donna the waitress was there, and she nodded a greeting to him too, like he’d been there every day without fail. She brought him coffee and the phone, and he called up to his secretary.
‘I’m down here, Moira.’
‘Now there’s a surprise.’
‘Bring me the latest updates and paperwork, messages, mail, all that shit. We’ll deal with it here, okay?’ He put down the phone and ordered ham and eggs, the eggs scrambled. Outside, New York was doing its New York thing, busy with energy and excess and people just trying to get by if they couldn’t get ahead.
‘More coffee?’
‘Thanks, Donna.’
She’d been serving him for a year, best part of, and still she never showed interest, never asked how he was doing or what he’d been doing. He’d bet she didn’t even remember his name. He was just a customer who sometimes made a local call and tipped her well for the service. That was it. That was all he was.
Jesus, it was going to be hard getting by without the D-MAN.
The parents, he should never have talked to the parents. They’d made the guy too real, too human. They’d stripped away all the cunning and the menace and had confronted him with photos of a gangly awkward youth with skinny arms and a lopsided grin. Photos on the beach, in the park, waving from the driving seat of Pop’s car.
He should never have gone. He hadn’t explained what he was doing there. He’d mumbled some explanation about their son maybe being witness to a crime, but now nobody could find him. They didn’t seem to care, so long as he wasn’t hurt.
No, he wasn’t hurt, not much. But he’d done some damage in Washington State.
Hoffer knew the parents weren’t the only reason, but they were an excusable one. He didn’t really know why he hadn’t killed the D-Man. Maybe he didn’t want another death on his hands. He’d told Michael Weston he’d never killed anyone. That wasn’t strictly true.
Hoffer had been killing himself for years.
The papers, of course, did not connect the D-Man to any of the stuff about Kline and Provost. Hoffer could have done that for them, but he chose not to. Instead he was biding his time. He was waiting for a lull in the news, when empty pages and screen time were screaming out to be filled. That was the time for him to step forward with his story and maybe even his photos, all about tracking down the D-Man and killing him. There was no body to show, of course, so Hoffer must’ve disposed of it in some way.