“How much time do we have?” she asks, her finger inside a David Levien novel.
“All day.”
“Good.” She heads to an overstuffed chair at the end of an aisle, back to a faux-paneled wall, plops down, and starts reading.
Another answer is possible. The reason I found Risina, or maybe the reason she found me: she’s been a tiger all along and only needed someone to unlock her cage. She’s a natural. A predator.
And if that’s the case, what happens when she first tastes blood?
The gate buzzes open, and Risina and I pull our sedan in and park near the front door. I’ll admit, I’m troubled by the one sentence Kirschenbaum jabbed with: He doesn’t do the work you think he does. I didn’t know where he was going with that, but I didn’t want to chase my tail either. He wasn’t lying to me-he definitely knew something about Spilatro he didn’t want to come right out and say. But what? He doesn’t do the work you think he does. I did bite the carrot after all.
Smoke died in an accident the same way this contract killer operated in the past. I have the files that prove it. Spilatro killed Smoke, but he meant to kill me. He has to be the guy who put my name on the paper, the guy who kidnapped Archie. So why would Kirschenbaum say Spilatro doesn’t do the work I think he does? What other work does Spilatro do?
Efficiently, Risina and I cross to the entrance and don’t have long to wait as a mustachioed guard opens the door and points upstairs without saying a word. There’s something familiar about him, but I can’t place him and he has me wondering: did Kirschenbaum plant him somewhere else around us? Was he in the hotel? The bookstore? Have we been watched from the moment we left his front gate? And if this guy was trailing us and I didn’t pick him up, then how many other men did K-bomb put on us? Kirschenbaum didn’t have the career he had by flying by the seat of his pants, and maybe what I mistook for calm bravado in our hotel room was actually informed caution.
I’ve got a feeling of foreboding I’ve learned to trust over the years, but I don’t want to look back at the guard and give away any hesitation, so I head up the staircase. Risina is in front of me and maybe that’s what’s making me jumpy… we’ve been on someone else’s turf together before, but this is the first time that someone’s known we were coming. My intuition told me that Kirschenbaum’s play would be to give me what I want, that he’s a bottom-line opportunist and the percentages were to give up information on Spilatro rather than risk a confrontation with me, but maybe my intuition is rusty and I’m going to find out I’m wrong the hard way.
We make it to a long hallway with wood floors and the first thing I notice is that the guard-where did I see him before? — didn’t follow us up and, in fact, there are no other guards visible on the second floor. I know Kirschenbaum platoons his security but I don’t know where they position themselves in the house, and the whole thing is starting to reek like a corpse.
Risina looks back at me for guidance. She knows instinctively not to ask questions aloud, and I nod her forward toward the cracked door that spills light at the end of the corridor. I think she picks up something on my face because she blanches a bit, swallows hard, and then keeps moving.
I’m acutely aware of our breathing, the only breathing I can hear in the house, and the front door opens and closes downstairs, I’m sure of it. What the hell are we walking into? If I could think of where I saw that guy, maybe without the mustache, maybe with different color hair or no hair, goddammit, I’m coming up blank… I can now glimpse a four-poster through the crack in the door, so this must be the master bedroom, and I touch Risina on the elbow to let me pass and enter first. She steps back and my heart pulses now, a welcome feeling, a fine feeling, and maybe Risina feels it too because she looks alert and spry.
The guard didn’t frisk us, which is unusual but not unheard of in this situation, especially since we’d made contact and been invited here by the man we’re meeting. I wouldn’t have given up my gun anyway and we might have had a problem downstairs, but it doesn’t matter now and I pull out my Glock from the small of my back and I don’t look but I know Risina is doing the same.
Three more feet to the door, and there are voices, but they’re television voices, two idiot anchormen blathering on about some reality star and that seems incongruous with the man in our hotel room, what he’d be watching on a weeknight, just one more square peg that doesn’t fit. So much for not coming in with guns out…
I push the door open wider and the bedroom is empty, but there’s an open set of French doors leading out to a deck on the right and maybe he’s out there, but why wouldn’t he have signaled us or had someone show us in?
This is not right and there’s no use for pretense anymore.
“Kirshenbaum?”
No answer. As I move to the deck, I tell Risina to watch the door.
The deck has some patio furniture, the rustic kind of chairs with green cushions surrounding a slat-wood table, and Kirschenbaum is out here all right. He’s wearing a plastic bag over his head, held tightly around his neck by an elastic cord, and his hands are tied behind his back and strapped to his feet. A lit cigar is in the ashtray in front of him.
I hear sirens in the distance headed our way and in that moment it hits me where I know the guard. I’ve seen him twice before, and goddammit, I should have recognized him. I used to be a fucking expert at breaking down a face, noting the eyes and the ears and the parts you cannot disguise, but I used to be a professional contract killer and now I don’t know what the hell I am.
The first time I saw him was in a construction vest on scaffolding outside of the Third Coast Cafe, except he wore a dark beard and blond hair, and the second time was without facial hair, or any hair at alclass="underline" the big bald guy who came into Archibald’s office and asked us our business, the guy I fucking let go because I thought he was nobody important.
There can only be one answer. The man who let us in was Spilatro, and he’s been playing me like a violin since I got to Chicago, or maybe before that, maybe since Smoke pulled a safety deposit box out of its slot and caught a flight to find me.
“What is it?” Risina calls from the doorway and I realize I need to snap out of it and move now if we’re going to escape.
“K-bomb’s dead.”
“What?” she asks, alarmed.
“Spilatro’s framing us. Let’s go.”
I take her by the elbow and just poke my head into the hallway when a pistol cracks and bullets pound the doorway next to my head. I feel Risina duck back and I spot blood fly and goddammit, if he hit her…
We spill backward into the room and her cheek is scratched to hell but not from a bullet, rather from splinters from the door and she looks angrier than I’ve ever seen her, like the blood on her cheek brought the tiger to the surface for good. Multiple pairs of feet pound up the stairs down the hall, and I catch a quick look at them as I fire a few rounds back, popping the first guy flush and stopping the rest, and maybe they don’t know the boss is already dead, and maybe they don’t hear the sirens as they close in on us.
Spilatro wasn’t with them, though, I’m sure of it. The son of a bitch must’ve planned the whole thing. He framed us with both the cops and the bodyguards, hoping we’d get caught in the crossfire. He bolted out the front door as soon as we went up the stairs-that was the door opening and closing I heard-and he’s probably a mile away by now.
I hear scuffles down the hall and maybe the guards hear the sirens outside, which grow nearer, louder by the second. Risina and I are going to have a chance, but it’s going to be a slim one and we have to do it soon, we have to make our move in those moments of inevitable confusion as the cops make their way on to the scene but don’t know exactly what they’re rolling into.
I see the bubble lights now, a pair of cruisers, that’s it, and they blitz through the gate, knocking it off its hinges, then roar up the driveway, pinning our rental sedan in front of them as both sets of doors fly open and uniformed police officers spill out, guns drawn.