“Is Dr. Silverman aware of this?” he said.
“Tomorrow,” I said.
“I’d like to know if she was merely a part of your plot against me,” he said.
“I don’t care what you’d like,” I said. “You need to deliver the money by tomorrow. You want to set a time and place, I’ll be here.”
I thought for a moment that he might bite me. But he didn’t. He gathered himself and straightened his shoulders and after a moment of venomous staring, he turned and left the office. In the hall, Hawk opened the door for him, and closed it after him. I walked to the spare room and watched as Alderson walked up Linnaean Street toward Garden.
“You want it all, don’t you,” Hawk said.
“All,” I said. “Alderson, FFL, anybody who surfaces along the way.”
“You think he’ll come up with the million?”
“No.”
“You think he going to make a date to deliver,” Hawk said,
“and show up with some shooters?”
“I do.”
“And we gonna be ready for them?”
“We are,” I said.
Hawk grinned.
“And maybe we be lucky,” Hawk said. “And Alderson show up with the shooters and you got to kill him?”
“I’m going to roll this up,” I said. “I have to kill him, I will.”
“You already ratted him out to Epstein,” Hawk said.
“Double coverage,” I said. “I don’t want to wait for them. Until it’s done Susan can’t live her life.”
“You, me, Vinnie, and Chollo,” Hawk said. “You need anybody else? Maybe Tony give us some people.”
“We’ll be enough,” I said.
“Hell, you and me enough, babe,” Hawk said. “Everybody else just lighten the load.”
“There’s a lot on the line here,” I said. “I think I’ll stick with the old favorites.”
65.
In the event that Alderson and company didn’t bother to make an appointment, I went to sleep on top of Susan’s bed with all my clothes on. At 2:12 Hawk came in and woke me.
“They here,” he said.
I rolled out of bed. Put the Browning on my hip, stuffed two extra magazines into my pocket, and followed Hawk downstairs. We went into the spare room. There were no lights on. Chollo stood at one side of the front window looking out through the open louvered shutters. In Susan’s office, at that front window, I could see Vinnie dimly in the ambient light from the street. Vinnie had an assault rifl e.
“Chollo taking a little tour,” Hawk said. “Spotted them.”
“They make you?” I said.
“I am more stealthy than the Mexican jaguar,” Chollo said. He continued to look out the window as he spoke.
“So they didn’t make you?”
“Of course not.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“They arrived in a van,” Chollo said. “No markings. I count six. They have all been seeing many movies, I think. Black clothes, faces blackened.”
“I like the look,” Hawk said.
“Guns?” I said.
“Handguns, of course,” Chollo said. “I spotted at least one automatic weapon. An Uzi, I believe.”
“Where are they now?” I said.
“Around the house,” Chollo said.
“They don’t know that Susan’s not here,” I said. “And they need to get us both.”
“Doors are locked,” Hawk said.
“But not impenetrable,” I said.
“How nice,” Hawk said.
“Two ways for them to go,” I said. “Back stairs up to the porch off Susan’s kitchen, or through the front hall here and up the front stairs.”
“I’d do both,” Hawk said.
“Yes,” I said. “Me too. Chollo, you and Vinnie take upstairs. Off the kitchen. Hawk and I will lie in the weeds down here.”
Vinnie had already started up the stairs.
“I want one of them alive,” I said.
Chollo smiled.
“Play it safe,” Chollo said. “You get one alive. We get one alive. You don’t need two, I’ll shoot one.”
“Fine,” I said. “You see any sign of Alderson?”
“Sadly no,” Chollo said, and followed Vinnie up the stairs.
“They have jaguars in Mexico?” Hawk said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Why don’t you take Susan’s office. They come through here, we’ll catch them between us.”
“Okay,” Hawk said. “But shoot careful. I don’t want you to shoot me.”
“You shoot,” I said. “I’m going to grab one.”
66.
In susan’s spare room, where I stood, with the louvers closed, the silence merged with the darkness, so that each seemed more intense than it otherwise would have. The dim nocturnal glow of streetlamps, moon, and stars drifted in through the glass panels in the front door, and made things faintly visible in the hallway. But Hawk, ten feet away from me in Susan’s offi ce, was perfectly invisible.
The darkness was thick and close.
I was holding a sawed-off baseball bat. A Manny Ramirez model. I kept my 9mm Browning on my hip, with a full magazine and a round in the chamber. No sound came from upstairs where Chollo waited with Vinnie. No sound came from Susan’s office where Hawk waited with his big .44 Mag in a shoulder holster, holding a sawed-off, twelve-gauge doublebarreled shotgun. I went to the front window and looked out through the shutter. Nothing moved on the street. No traffic. No cars with the headlights on and the heater going while the driver listened to late-night radio in the warm car. No couples coming home from a late party, holding hands, looking forward to intimacy. The quiet was stifl ing.
From the back of the house came the faint sound of glass breaking. It wasn’t much. They’d probably taped it fi rst. Then more silence. Then maybe the hint of a latch being turned, a door being opened. Then silence again. Then, suddenly, a dim movement in the front hall. One man, carrying a handgun, dressed in black, his face blackened. He went to the front door and unlatched the safety bar and opened the door. Two more men came in. One had an Uzi. They too were all in black. The two men started silently up the front stairs. The first man, the man who had let them in, checked to see that the door was unlocked and then closed it and turned and started to follow the other two past me where I stood in the spare room. I stepped out behind him as he passed and brought the sawed-off baseball bat down on his gun hand. He yelped softly and the gun clattered on the front hall floor. The noise was shockingly loud. The men on the stairs turned. I grabbed my guy by the hair and yanked him into the spare room. The man with the Uzi sprayed the hallway with bullets. As soon as he stopped shooting, Hawk stepped out of Susan’s office and killed both men with the shotgun.
In the offi ce I had my man on the fl oor with my knee on his chest and the muzzle of the Browning pressed hard against the bridge of his nose. Hawk dropped the shotgun, took out his handgun, and went up the front stairs past the two dead men without making a sound.
On the floor in the spare room, my guy was perfectly still, disoriented, probably, from the suddenness of his situation. For several moments there was no sound. Then there was a rattle of gunfire from upstairs. Then there was nothing. Then there was the sound of footsteps on the front stairs, and Hawk’s voice.
“We got one too,” Hawk said.
67.
We found the van keys on one of the dead men.
Vinnie pulled the van up beside Susan’s house and we put the dead men in it, being careful about fingerprints. With Hawk behind him, Vinnie drove the van up to Porter Square and left it in the parking lot at the shopping center. Then he came back with Hawk.