Cooper sat there, stuck to the seat, thinking for a moment.
“You know,” he said, “and some of us can speak from experience on this-one thing most of your bosses are not is wise. In fact, I can think of one of them in particular who happens to be a horse’s ass. And about as wise as a horse’s ass too, while we’re at it.”
Cooper saw the door open across the street. Jim came out hurriedly, a protesting Rhonda in tow. He looked down at the in-dash clock. It said 12:33.
“Gotta run, Lie Detector,” he said. “Go easy on the Chardonnay.”
It was a guess, but Cooper took the lack of any reply before the click when Laramie hung up as affirmation of the guess. He wondered if she’d been smiling as she broke the connection-Cooper the fellow lie detector, figuring her out.
Jim didn’t bother to wait for the cab he’d presumably called for Rhonda but instead simply left her on the stairs, strolled over to his van, gunned the engine, and pulled out.
Figuring he might need the help if Jim had any excitement planned, Cooper had borrowed from a bit he’d seen in the movie Chinatown and busted one of Jim’s taillight covers a few minutes after the night’s first pager run. With the added luxury of the naked white bulb shining from the rear of the minivan, Cooper let Jim pull out and get a good way out ahead before he fell in behind. Once they hit the main drag Cooper stayed about a half mile back, easily able to see the beacon of the busted taillight up the road apiece.
He tailed Jim into one of downtown Kingston’s worst slums, about thirty minutes from the Belle Acres love nest. Jim drove around for a while, seemingly aimless, before parking his minivan in an alley. Cooper pulled the Taurus against the curb across the street from the alley, parking at an angle, so that he could see the van itself, but that was about it. He saw from the sign at the corner of the alley that they were on East Queen Street. Jim exited the van and walked out of the alley and onto East Queen, Cooper getting a good look at him as he passed under the splash of the streetlights, that bright red hair of his cut high-and-tight.
There were a couple of nightclubs and some shops on this segment of East Queen. Long since closed for the night, most of the shops were protected by the usual articulated metal cage doors; there were enough winos and junkies sleeping in the storefront alcoves that Cooper lost count trying to figure out how many were living here.
Jim went up the street, away from Cooper, and seemed to decide on a particular alcove, Cooper seeing it was a pawnshop. He disappeared into the pocket of darkness and was in there long enough for Cooper to think Jim might have shaken him when a tiny orange flame flared from the alcove. After that a similar orange glow appeared from time to time. This went on for a while, maybe twenty-five minutes, Jim having a smoke under the awning of a pawnshop at one-thirty in the morning on one of the worst streets in all of Kingston.
Then Jim came out of the alcove. Cooper watched as he flicked the remnants of his last cigarette into the street, turned, and began to walk with a deliberate stride back down the street, moving in the direction of the van. Cooper was ready for a confrontation, figuring Jim would easily have made him from the alcove, Cooper sitting in a gleaming Ford Taurus with four hundred miles on the odometer in a neighborhood littered with vehicle carcasses. Jim didn’t come his way, though, and instead paused on the other side of the street and looked around the interior of another alcove from his spot on the sidewalk.
Cooper realized what it was Jim had in mind just before he did it.
Turning suddenly into the alcove, Jim leaped on the bum sleeping against the wall and unleashed a series of savage, pistonlike kicks into the man’s head. The attack was silent, brutal, and quick. Once the violence subsided, Jim checked his victim over, grabbed him by his hair to take a look, confirming the knockout. Then he threw the wino over his shoulder, shifted his posture to get comfortable with the weight, and carried the comatose bum back to the van. Cooper had the urge to get out of the Taurus, walk across the street, and kick Jim’s teeth in, but he knew it wouldn’t do him, or his twice-dead client, any good. He still had to find out where Jim was headed, why, and to see whom. Among other things.
Jim drove a few miles on a main thoroughfare before making another turn. Cooper was completely lost, but he discovered this didn’t matter, since Jim wasn’t going anywhere-he parked on a quiet side street and simply remained inside the van. After a while, Cooper saw him duck into the back; after another while, he returned to smoke another cigarette in the front seat before leading Cooper onto the highway.
At 3:11 by Cooper’s dashboard clock, Jim exited the turnpike. Cooper burned some fuel catching up as the Mitsubishi vanished from the through-way, and as he followed Jim’s route off the exit ramp he saw a sign displaying the words CANNERY and MUSEUMS. He caught the broken taillight around a corner between what appeared to be a pair of abandoned warehouses before the minivan’s brake lights flared and Cooper could see Jim easing the Mitsubishi out onto a dock.
Cooper parked the Taurus and got out. He could smell the Caribbean immediately. They’d come to a run-down waterfront district where some of the buildings had been preserved and repainted as museums, others either abandoned or used anonymously, streaks of grime and rust evident along their corrugated metal siding. Two piers stretched out into the bay; rows of creosote-laden pilings supported the fat buildings the way giraffe legs might hold up an elephant. Cooper could see the van out on the first pier, the southernmost, so he found his way out to the end of the other.
Cooper heard the thrum of an approaching engine and pegged it, without being able to see the boat, for a Bertram or a Chris-Craft, Cooper guessing at least a forty-five-footer. He found a small depression in the planks of the pier, a place where he could sit, adequately camouflaged, and still enjoy an unobstructed view of Jim. Jimbo, he saw, was leaning against the front grille of the minivan, having another smoke. Cooper wondered whether it was tobacco or dope he’d been smoking along the way.
The boat approached the dock sideways, giving the pilings a brawny bump, Cooper thinking the boat’s captain couldn’t keep a freight train on railroad tracks. It looked a little bigger than he’d thought, maybe fifty feet, but definitely a Chris-Craft like he’d guessed; it was hard to tell, given the boat’s severe weathering. What he could see, even in the half-moon darkness, was that the hull was swollen with barnacles and stained with blooms of rust.
A thin white guy wearing foul-weather gear and a baseball cap emerged from the rear of the boat. He secured the lines, climbed a ladder that Cooper hadn’t noticed was connected to the pier, and pulled himself up onto the dock. He and Jim came together, Jim still smoking; there was conversation which Cooper had no way of hearing, and then the white guy went back to the edge of the dock and waved. A second man, also white, appeared in the back of the boat holding something small and dark. He tossed it up to the guy on the dock and went back inside the boat. Cooper could see that he had thrown his companion a canvas athletic bag.
The first white guy handed the bag to Jim, who unzipped it, checked inside, then zipped it closed again and tossed the bag into the minivan through the open passenger-side window. Jim then opened the rear hatch and proceeded to remove the wino, now bound with duct tape. Jim carried him to the edge of the dock, where the first white guy, now positioned on the ladder, grabbed hold. Struggling to hold the wino’s near-dead weight, he climbed down the ladder to the boat. His companion came out again and helped take the wino into the cabin.