‘Which one has the malo ojo? Hinge asked, wiggling a finger in front of his left eye. ‘Chiado?’
Gomez shook his head.
‘Areno?’
And Gomez nodded. Hinge looked at the paper a few more moments. ‘Wanna let yer pal check out this office?’ he said to Falmouth, who took the slip and went into the other room.
‘Case ye’re lyin’,’ Hinge said to Gomez. Gomez shook his head again. He shook his head hard.
‘But supposin’, man?’ Hinge said, smiling.
Gomez raised his eyes as if in prayer, still shaking his head.
‘How’s it goin’?’ he called to Falmouth.
‘He’s calling me right back.’,
‘Four-oh.’
The phone rang and Hinge could hear Falmouth talking very low into the phone, heard him hang up..
‘You were dead on,’ Falmouth said, coming back into the bathroom. ‘It’s an old office building in the La Pastora section. The first floor’s converted into a garage for the tenants.’
‘Hell, I didn’t think he’d lie, pardner. Not ol’ Ray-fi-el. Right, Ray-fi-el?’
Gomez stared back and forth between his two captors. There was abject terror in his eyes.
‘One or two more questions — this Chiado, is he married?’ Yes.
‘Is that his car?’
No.
‘Areno’s car?’
Yes.
‘So how does Chiado get to the meeting?’
Gomez wrote down the words ‘el omnibus.’
‘Sonbitch,’ Hinge said, ‘can you believe it. A two-million- dollar heist and this guy Chiado goes to collect the loot in a fuckin’ bus.’
‘Perfect,’ Falmouth said.
‘Four-oh,’ Hinge said, and he pressed the side of his foot on the plug and shoved it into the socket.
The wire hummed and Gomez thrashed frantically in the chair, his screams muffled by the gag. The chair fell sideways against the wall and the legs slipped out from under it and the chair toppled over backwards in the tub. Bubbles dribbled up from Gomez’s nose. His body was seized with spasms. Then he went limp. After a while the bubbles stopped.
Hinge unplugged him. ‘Doesn’t take but a minute,’ he said.
‘Let’s stuff him and his galfriend in the trunk, let Domignon take care of ‘em. That sonbitch hasn’t done shit in this deal but sit on his ass and thank God he wasn’t the one got snatched.’
Psychologically, it was necessary to take another hostage, one who was married and who was one of the leaders. Gomez would not have worked. Besides, he .vas dead. And Falmouth decided Areno and his pals would probably be glad he was. Fewer people to divide the loot with. So they checked over the list again and the obvious choice was Chiado. He lived close by in the slums of the foothills. And he would be taking the bus to the downtown section, which would leave him wide open.
They drove slowly past the house in a Firebird that Angel had arranged for Falmouth to use. It was, like Gomez’s house, little more than a hut hard by the side of a pockmarked street. Hinge focused his compact Leitz binoculars on the windows as they passed the house. Chiado was eating dinner with his family. His wife, a young woman bordering on obesity, was nursing a small child. There were two other children t the table.
‘He’s there, awright,’ Hinge drawled. ‘Chowin’ down with a fat wife and three rug-runners.’
They drove to the corner, turned and drove six blocks to a main street. Angel was waiting for then.
‘Eleven forty-five, right?’ Hinge said as he got out.
‘Eleven forty-five,’ Falmouth repeated and drove back to the Chiado house while Angel and Hinge went off into the night to be hijacked again.
Hinge felt exhilarated as they took the blindfold off. It was the same room, squalid and bare except for the negotiating table and the telephone and a .45-caliber pistol lying on the table in front of Areno. Hinge sat in the same chair with the briefcase, handcuffed to one wrist, resting in his lap. Now his blood was racing in anticipation of the next few minutes. He felt no fear. He was never afraid. Rather, he was stimulated by the potential danger of the situation. There had been a tense moment when the Rafsaludi intercepted them and Areno realized that Gomez was not driving the car. Hinge explained that Gomez had not shown up and that he had picked another driver, not wanting to be late. Areno nervously accepted the explanation.
Hinge looked at his watch. It was ten forty-one. He looked around the room. No Lavander. No Chiado, either, of course. ‘Where’s our man?’ he asked Areno.
Areno glared at him with his good eye and shrugged. ‘One of our people ees late,’ he said.
‘That don’t answer m’question. Is Lavander with him?’
The leader curled his lips back and showed two rows of ragged yellow teeth. ‘We decide to feel the weight of your money first, gringo. Hokay? Then maybe you get back thees scarecrow of yours.’
The three men laughed.
‘The deal was, we trade here. The money for Lavander. That’s the deal.’
The leader shrugged and held out his hands, palms up. ‘We change our mind, hokay?’
Another round of laughter.
Hinge smiled. ‘No Lavander, no dinero, hokay?’
He shifted in his chair. The handcuffs rattled as he moved the briefcase on his lap. It was pointed at Arena, the spokesman.
‘Hey, señor, I could cut your arm off with one leetle whack of my machete.’
‘Reckon ya could, pal.’
Areno showed his bad teeth again.
Hinge smiled back. ‘The case stays with me until I see Lavander, got it?’
The leader was still grinning, but the grin turned nasty. ‘You talk big, for a leetle man. One needs friends with heem, to talk like that.’
‘Oh, I got a lot of friends. F’r instance — he looked at his watch — ‘one of them is at ol’ Chiados house right now. Why dontcha call him before we do any more talkin’.’
The three terrorists looked at one another quizzically. How did the gringo know Chiado’s name? What kind of trick was he pulling?
‘You better call him,’ Hinge said, in a voice that had become flatter and harder.
The leader stared at him for several seconds and then picked up the receiver and dialled a number.
‘Never know till ya try, right?’ Hinge said.
Falmouth sat behind the wheel of the Firebird about a hundred feet from Chiado’s house. On the back of the front seat on the passenger side there was a small clear plastic dish, no larger than a tea saucer, with a parabolic mike the size of a fingernail in its centre. It was aimed at the open front window of Chiado’s house with a thin cord from the mike to the speaker in Falmouth’s right ear. The setup could pick up conversations a thousand yards away.
Chiado lay beside Falmouth on the front seat. Around his throat was a thread of C-4 plastique no thicker than a nylon fishing line. Imbedded in the back of it was a tiny radio-controlled fuse. Chiado had been dead for more than an hour, ever since Falmouth dropped him in his tracks. Chiado had seen the tall gringo, with the cigar, leaning over the door, locking his car. As Chiado approached him the big man turned to him, pointing to the cigar, and said, in perfect Spanish, ‘Deme Un fosforo, por favor.’ And an instant later Chiado felt something sting his throat and it began to burn and the burning spread like a fire down his neck into his chest and down his arms to his fingers and then the world seemed to spin away from him and the man with the cigar got smaller and smaller. The dart had hit the main nerve in Chiado’s throat. Falmouth threw the terrorist in the front seat, pulled down a dark street and garrotted him.
Falmouth’s ear was deluged with sound. Two crying children, a woman’s shrill commands rising above the blaring radio somewhere in another part of the house, another child whimpering in her arms. Then the phone rang and she answered
‘Que hay!... Buenas noches, Areno ... Quë pasa?