“Granted,” he said. “But I know a commercial property when I see one, and I am sitting on one. And whether or not I am certifiable, it would take a close blood relative to certify me. You’re a good friend, Sam, I came to you with this problem in the first place because I like you and trust you and I know you’re a good friend. But you don’t have the right to pull the plug on me on this thing.”
“I know about a murder,” I said. “Legally, I have to report it to the police.”
“You’ve known about it since November,” he pointed out. “You didn’t report then, you don’t have to report now. Nothing’s changed. There was a little mistake, an error in judgment—”
“Jesus Christ, Ross!”
“That’s what it was! And it’s over, it’s over, it’s over! What do you want from me?” Then, struck by a sudden thought, he leaned closer and said, “Listen, how about this? I’ll phone you every day. Twice a day if you want. Let you know how things are going, everything’s all right. I don’t phone you, that’s when you bring in the cavalry.”
“You’re out of that house now,” I told him. “I’d like you to stay out of it, stay away from it, let the law go in there and clean them out.”
“And the book?”
“Oh, come on, Ross, you want it published posthumously?”
“Depends on the advance,” he said, then shook his head and his right hand, saying, “Sorry, no, bad joke. All I can say is, I’ve told you everything I can, I’ll make constant phone calls to you if you want, I guarantee you’re not in any danger, and all I ask is you don’t bring in the law just yet. Please, Sam. No cops, not before they make their move.”
How could I agree to such a thing? It was completely crazy, wildly dangerous, and probably illegal. Ross clutched my arm, bent forward, staring at me, straining with every pore to force me to go along with his conviction.
But how could I? These people had already murdered three times. They had done their best to murder me. They were blackmailing Ross, planning to kidnap some world figure, and three of them had casually raped Doreen en passant. How could I just walk away from it, think about something else?
“Listen, Ross,” I said. “I can understand the way you’re thinking now, I see you’re all full of this book idea, but these people aren’t research. They’re alive, and they’re mean, and they’ll kill you like blowing their nose.”
“No,” he said. “They need me, and I understand them. Sam, for Christ’s sake, you always told me I was a good writer, you liked the scripts I did on PACKARD, you thought they—”
“What has that got to do with anything? This isn’t PACKARD!”
“This is people.” His palms were pressed flat on the tabletop, he was leaning toward me over them like a gymnast, as brittle as an ice sculpture in his intensity. “Sam,” he said, “you’ve written stories, what the hell do you think a story is? Is it just ‘and then, and then, and then’? That’s for the bricklayers! Stories are people, who they are and what they’re doing and what they’ll do next. If I’m any damn good at what I do, it’s because I know the tools of my trade, and the tools of my trade are people.”
“Oh, come on, Ross, how can—”
He made an abrupt hurling motion, pointing up and away to his right with a trembling rigid arm, as though aiming at some castle on the hill. “Those are people up there, Sam,” he said, “and I know them, and I’ve been tiptoeing through them like Tippi Hedren in The Birds, and if you don’t go making some fucking loud noise, I’ll be all right!”
“Ross, this doesn’t make any—”
“Let me tell you something,” he said. The pointing finger came around to vibrate in my direction. “You blow the whistle here, I’ll tell you what happens next. I’m out, you said so yourself, but Doreen is still in. If I don’t come back, the very first thing they do is turn Doreen into cold cuts, and I am not kidding.”
“The police could—”
“Bring the mayo. There’s no way to stop it, Sam. There’s no way to stop them packing that girl into a suitcase and leaving. I don’t know where they’ll go. You don’t know where they’ll go. But they can always find us, fella, and don’t you forget it. And they’ll still work out some way to do what they want to do. So what will you accomplish, except to kill three people, including yourself?”
“And your book.”
“You’re goddamn right, and my book!” he yelled. “I’m going through fucking hell in that house, and I want my reward at the end of it!”
“A bullet in the back of the head.”
“That’s up to me, Sam,” he said. “That’s my choice.” How could I leave it to Ross’s judgment when he’d spent his entire life proving he had no judgment? How could I trust him to really understand what was going on in his house?
He leaned farther and farther forward, his face straining toward me, eyes trying to burn inside my head and rewire what they found there. “Sam, Sam,” he said, half-whispering. “I’ll never get a shot like this again.”
If I were to call the deputies, could Ross’s friends be gone before they arrived? Probably. Would they do something atrocious to Doreen in revenge? Absolutely. Would they go to ground somewhere unknown and scheme some other way to pull their kidnapping? Of course.
If I did nothing, at least Doreen and Ross were safe for the moment, and we knew where to find those people. If I did nothing, Ross himself might finally get scared enough of the situation to come out and give the full cooperation that would be necessary; the name of the country behind this, the place where the attack was supposed to happen, the name of the intended victim. At this moment, if I called the deputies, Ross would clam up solid.
I sighed. I folded the piece of paper and put it in my pocket. Ross sat back, trembling, grinning from ear to ear, letting out long-held breath. “It’ll be all right, Sam,” he said.
It was already all wrong, and I knew it. “I could change my mind at any second,” I said.
“You won’t have to, Sam,” he promised me. “From here on, from here on, it’s a coast, all the way.”
19
The exterior of the limousine was silver, with black windows and the license plate SSTAR 23, its owner (and the chauffeur’s employer) being Star Car Service, with whom CNA has an annual contract. The interior was an egg carton for Fabergé eggs, each cup (or seat) lined with thick silvery blue plush, the floor and most other surfaces covered with hairy shag carpeting in the same color, so that riding in it was like being in a science fiction movie’s idea of a symbolic womb.
There were four low roomy seats in the passenger area, two facing forward at the two facing back. The tiny refrigerator between the forward-facing seats was filled with splits of many different liquids, while the small TV screen between the rear-facing seats was dead black when not in use. The chauffeur’s — I nearly said “pilot’s” — compartment could be closed away by electrically raising either a clear glass or a black plastic partition.
Our arrangement in the limo lent itself to a discreet form of psychological pressure. I was in the right rear seat, left forearm atop the refrigerator, while the other two sat facing me, flanking the TV’s square black doorway. Danny was directly opposite, demonstrating his respect by giving me lots and lots of legroom, his own legs twisted out of the way as though to say that mere producers don’t need such things. The partitions between us and the chauffeur were left down, the space open, because, of course, none of us had anything to hide.