“No.”
“If you find him, then what? Will you shoot him down in cold blood?”
“I’m not a killer. Is that what you think?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore.”
“Then don’t think anything. Let me take care of myself.”
“But you’re not taking care of yourself, that’s the point. What if the police find out what you’re doing? What if they find out you’re carrying that gun?”
“I’ve got a permit for the gun,” I said.
“They could put you in jail for interfering with a police investigation. You know that as well as I do.”
“Nobody’s going to put me in jail.”
“Or else you’ll wind up right back in the hospital,” she said. “Don’t you care about your health?”
“I care about it. I care about a lot of things.”
“Including me?”
“You don’t have to ask that question.”
“Then why won’t you confide in me? Why won’t you listen to reason?”
“Kerry, look, I know what I’m doing. I’ve got reasons.”
“What reasons?”
“I can’t tell you right now.”
“Why can’t you?”
“Because I can’t. Let it go at that, will you?”
“I don’t want to let it go. Don’t you see that I care about you too? More than I ever did — more than I was willing to let myself believe the past few weeks. It can be good for us again; we can start over, we can move ahead, we can have a future. Isn’t that what you want?”
“You know it is.”
“But you’re not letting it happen. The shooting, Eberhardt in a coma... it’s monstrous. But something good can come out of it; it can bring us back together, if only you’d let it.”
“I will let it.”
“When?”
“When this thing is over.”
She pursed her lips. “It might be too late then.”
“It won’t be. I’ll be all right.”
“Will you? I don’t know if I will be. I don’t know if I’ll still want you then — a man with secrets, a man who carries a gun. The man I want is the one you used to be, not the one you are now.”
“Kerry, I love you. Isn’t that enough?”
She was leaning toward me, with one hand spread on the cushion in front of her. I reached out to touch it, but she moved it away. “I’m not sure,” she said. “Maybe it isn’t.”
“Try to understand. This is something I have to do. I couldn’t walk away from it now if I wanted to. And the less you or anyone else knows about it, the better.”
“Why? Because it might get you killed?”
“Because it’s something I have to handle alone.”
“All right,” she said stiffly. “Have it your way.” The ring of keys was still in her hand; she took mine off it, laid it on the coffee table. “Here’s your key. So you won’t have to worry about me coming back uninvited.”
“You don’t have to do that—”
“You don’t have to do what you’re doing either.” She stood. “I’d better go.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to stay a while longer?”
“Yes, I’m sure. It wouldn’t do either of us any good.”
“I guess maybe not.”
“I won’t bother you again,” she said. “Call me if you want to talk, or if you decide to come to your senses.”
She crossed to the door, opened it, looked around at me as if she thought I might change my mind and call her back. I just sat there. It was a hard thing to do; I loved her, and maybe she loved me and was ready to give me another chance, and I hated this new crisis between us. But the other thing was in the way, like a wall I had to knock down before I could get to her or back to myself. There was no way to explain it, no way to make it any different. That was just the way it was.
“If I have to go to your funeral,” she said from the doorway, “I won’t cry. I just want you to know that.” And then she was gone.
I sat in silence for a time. I could feel the gun digging into my side — that damned gun. You could have shot her, I thought. Who the hell do you think you are, Mike Hammer? The wild-eyed crusader, the vigilante with a gun and a “get them before they get us” philosophy? Borderline lunatic stuff. Don’t let it happen, brother. Do what you have to do, but don’t cross that line.
After a while I got up and put the chain on the door and took myself into the bedroom. I was asleep as soon as I flopped into bed.
Eleven
The telephone woke me.
It was dark in the room, but I had not been asleep very long; I came up out of it groggy and disoriented, with a kind of bloated feeling, the way you do after you’ve been wrenched out of a deep sleep after only a few hours. When I struggled over toward the phone I came down hard on my left shoulder; pain rocketed the length of the arm, brought a strangled yell out of me. But it also cleared away some of the sticky web in my mind. I twisted back the other way, gritting my teeth, and kicked the wadded sheets out of the way and heaved into a sitting position.
The phone kept on ringing as I squinted at the night-stand clock. Ten-fifteen; I had been out close to four hours. I hauled up the receiver in the middle of another jangle and muttered a hello.
A male voice — a Chinese voice — said, “This is Jimmy Quon.”
That woke me up all the way. I took a tighter grip on the receiver and started to say something, but the words got caught in the dryness caking my throat. I worked up saliva, swallowed it, and this time I got the words out.
“What do you want, Quon?”
“I hear you looking for me. I think we better talk.”
“So talk. I’m listening.”
“Not on the phone. You want to meet me?”
“Why should I meet you?”
“That’s what you want, right? Face to face?”
“When?”
“Right now. You say where.”
“Sure. And you show up with that three fifty-seven Magnum of yours.”
“I got no big puppy like that, man,” he said. “You wrong about me; I didn’t have nothing to do with the dogs barking at you and the cop.”
“No, huh?”
“No. But maybe I know who did. You want to meet or not?”
“Yeah. I’d like a good look at you, sonny.”
“Pick a place. Public as you want.”
“St. Francis Hotel, lobby bar. Forty-five minutes.”
“Okay. I’ll be there.”
“Alone, Quon. And unarmed. Don’t try anything with me.”
“In a place like the St. Francis? Hey, I told you, man, you wrong about me. I don’t throw dog feed at the fan quai.”
“Forty-five minutes,” I said, and hung up on him.
I switched on the bedside lamp, used part of one sheet to wipe mucus out of my eyes. So what the hell is this? I thought. Some kind of trap, maybe, but I couldn’t see how it would work. He’d let me pick the place, and he’d have to be crazy to try taking me out in the lobby of the St. Francis; it was a highly respectable hotel on Union Square, always crowded, with a good security force. He could try it on the street outside, either before or after the meeting, but the streets in that area were well populated and well patrolled. Besides which, the St. Francis had three entrances on three different streets; he had no way of knowing which one I would use.
There were a hundred better, safer ways to make his move against me, and none of them required a telephone call to set up a meeting. It was possible that he’d been telling the truth, that he wasn’t the body-washer who’d gunned down Eberhardt and me — but if that was the case, then why had Kam Fong lied to me? Why had Lee Chuck put on his Charlie Chan act and made his veiled threats? No, I didn’t buy it. Quon was the boy, all right. And he was up to something. But what, damn it? What was the purpose in announcing himself to me beforehand?