He stopped and smiled rather grandly and added, ‘And that’s the point.’
‘What’s the point?’ Eliza asked.
‘The point is, this is no place for us to be right now.’
‘Amen,’ said O’Hara.
‘But Lavander could still be alive. If the police had a description of Lavander and Hinge...’
‘They wouldn’t do doodly-shit,’ said the Magician.
‘Lavander’s had it,’ O’Hara said. ‘By now Hinge is probably on his way back to Tucson or wherever he’s from, and all we’ve got is Lavander’s little black book of gibberish.’
Outside, Hinge huddled close to the cottage to escape the driving rain. He was grateful for the storm, since it provided excellent sound cover. The raindrops, battering palm leaves and ferns, sounded like drums accompanied by the timpani of thunder. He had moved as close to the window as possible, standing just outside its orbit of light but close enough to hear their conversation through the open window.
My God, he thought, they know my name and they know about Lavander! And what’s this about Lavander’s book?
Who the hell are these people, anyway?
It made no difference. Hinge decided very quickly that he had to kill all three of them. The question was when and how. He concluded that each of them had a cottage, accounting for the lights in the last three cottages. He would wait until they were each in their rooms and take them one at a time.
Piece a cake.
He continued his eavesdropping.
‘I think the book’s going to give up something,’ said the Magician.
‘All we gotta do is break Lavander’s code.’
‘All,’ Eliza said.
‘He carries the book with him. Obviously he makes entries in it all the time, so he must have memorized his own code. And if he memorized it, I can break it. And if I can’t, Izzy certainly can.’ He got up to leave. ‘What time did the pilot say he’d meet us at the airport?’
‘Five-thirty,’ O’Hara said.
‘I’ll wake everybody up,’ he said and left, scampering through the rain to his cottage, the last one in the row.
O’Hara hunched deep in one of the yellow-and-green chairs and said, ‘I’ll sleep here in the chair.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ Eliza said.
‘We’ve already underestimated Hinge once tonight. I’d feel better being here.’
Thunder rumbled outside the window and lightning snapped close by.
‘Better be careful, O’Hara, I’m liable to get the wrong impression, think you have a heart after all.’
‘Now, what does that mean?’
‘Up until now, you’ve been a robot.’
‘A robot!’
‘That’s right, a robot.’
‘Well, I don’t feel like a robot,’ he said, looking at her through half-closed eyes.
O’Hara had already dismissed the Lavander affair from his mind. They had botched it. Enough said. Now he concentrated on his competitor across the room, for that was how he still thought of her. Five feet tall, proficient and dangerously naïve.
That was the professional view. Personally, other things about her crowded his mind. She was prettier than he remembered from their brief meeting in Japan, and he had been too startled when she showed up in St. Lucifer to really pay any attention to her. Now he realized what a stunning woman she was. Her tininess simply added to her allure. Shaggy jet-black hair, cut short with curled strands peeking around her neck; wide, almost startled eyes, appearing even more vulnerable because of her size; a wondrously perfect nose and a tentative, pouty mouth that could, in an instant, become the most dazzling smile he had ever seen.
Beautiful, smart and tempting.
Very dangerous.
She was momentarily flustered and avoided contact with his green eyes. She Sat on the edge of the bed and looked down at the floor. O’Hara intimidated her and 1ad since before she met him. The biographical material she had read had commended him for many things, including his investigative ability. But it was his apparent mastery of the Japanese philosophy that both fascinated and unsettled her. He moved with oiled grace, which she attributed to his martial-arts training in Japan. She remembered the speed with which he accepted and defeated his attacker in Japan. Unruffled. Even with a stab wound, he was simply unruffled. In fact, he was uncomfortably calm. And now he seemed able to accept the inevitability of Lavander’s death without guilt or remorse. And yet, what she read to be something almost mystical might simply be the result of years of armouring. Perhaps O’Hara was so thoroughly shielded that he just seemed mystical.
She sighed and said, I can’t get used to the fact that we may have caused Lavander’s death.’
‘No, didn’t cause it. We didn’t save him. There’s a big difference.’
‘But can’t we do something? I’d recognize the car. And it was a rental, so he’ll have to turn it in and—’
‘A good hunter knows when the hunt is over.’
‘There you go. Mr Kimura talks like that all the time. “The smart man doesn’t wear wet socks.” How’s that?’
‘Actually, it would be, “The wise man does not put on his sock until the sun blesses it.”
‘Oh, bullshit.’ She paused for a second. ‘I’d just like to get another look at that creep, anyway. I’ve never seen a real live assassin before.’
‘You really have a taste for this, don’t you?’
‘For what?’
‘Chasing the big story. How did you get into this business, anyway? Hell, you’ve read my K-file, you know everything about me right down to my underwear size. I don’t know anything about you.’
How did she get into the business? Well, it had started because she was chubby.
When Eliza Gunn was growing up in Nebraska she was plump. Well, perhaps ‘plump’ is being generous. Actually she was somewhere between plump and fat. Chipmunk-cheeks- and-dimpled-legs chubby is what she was.
She lived in Ozone. Once you got a chuckle out of the name, it was all downhill. Dull. Dull. Dull. The only statue in town was of Calvin Coolidge, who once waved at Ozone from the rear of a passing train. So much for Ozone, Nebraska.
Her father owned the local drugstore and was a kind, patient, Christian man. Reserved, the kind that thinks a pat on the head is as good as a hug. Alwyn Gunn died thinking that only perverts read Playboy and that Quaaludes were tranquilizers. And that was in 1977.
Her mother died when she was three in a car wreck driving back from a shopping trip to Omaha. The drive was so dull that she fell asleep at the wheel. Alwyn hired a housekeeper, a German widow whose husband died in a fall off a tractor, and went about business as usual. He never remarried. Too much effort.
Chubby kids are cute. Until they get to be about six. A fat twelve-year-old is not cute. Eliza didn’t enter puberty, she stomped into it.
One of the reasons Lizzie Gunn was chubby is that if you lived in Ozone, there was no reason to be skinny. Actually there wasn’t much reason to do anything but eat, read books and get pregnant. A lot of Eliza’s friends got pregnant. Eliza read books and ate. Among his many ‘virtues, Alwyn Gunn was a lover of books. When she was just beginning to read, Alwyn would bring home half a dozen kids’ books to her from the library. By the time she was ten she was into the adult section.
She also realized, at about age ten, that she was different from everyone else. Not because she was chubby/fat, but because she didn’t want to be like everybody else. She had no desire to be one of the gang. If she couldn’t win, she would rather have come in ten minutes after everybody else. Anything to avoid being part of the herd. Fat or thin, the thought of being common repelled her. It was mental, not physical.
She also had a passion to find out, to be the first to know. To have a secret nobody else shared
The more she read, the more her fantasies blossomed.
No, they exploded.