At the same time, he couldn’t help thinking that this situation was likely to change radically within ten or twenty minutes. Spence would return, perceive instantly that there was an intruder in the house, and probably shoot him. Or a couple of survivors of last night’s debacle would show up to tell Kapak all about it, recognize Joe Carver, and take revenge for whatever he’d done last night. And, if nothing else happened, the police lieutenant would probably send a patrol car out at 9:01 to drag Kapak to headquarters. They’d bang on the door, get no answer, and then kick it in. Not only would Kapak’s immediate problem be solved, but so would the larger question of what to do about Joe Carver. The courts would put him away for a home invasion and for the sheer weirdness of keeping a naked man prisoner. Kapak had to stall until one of these things came to pass.
“Look,” he said. “I can see you’re a sensible, reasonable man. You didn’t come in here talking nasty and waving metal around. I’d love to talk to you about this and come up with some sort of mutually satisfactory arrangement.”
“That’s exactly what I want.”
“Good, good,” Kapak said, nodding his head. “Since we’re both civilized and neither of us is crazy, I’d like to get dressed before we do that. I feel at a loss here, standing around like this. It’s hard to concentrate.”
“That’s okay,” Carver said. “This doesn’t need to take a lot of your time. Now that you know I’m not the one you’ve been looking for, I’ll just go. You and I don’t have a problem.” He turned and moved toward the back door.
That wasn’t satisfactory. It would allow Carver to slip out into the yard and probably through the tall grove of bamboo on that side of the yard and over the fence. It wouldn’t bring him into a collision with Spence or the Gaffney brothers or the police.
“Wait” said Kapak.
Carver stopped and turned to face Kapak. For a moment Kapak endured Carver’s stare and tried to hold his eyes on Carver’s. The expression on Carver’s face changed to disappointment—not, Kapak reflected, anger or fright. “Sorry. Got to go.”
Kapak persisted. “It’s all well and good that you didn’t take my money. But what if you did something to my guys, or my cars? Is everything supposed to be even because you didn’t do one thing, but did five worse things?”
“If I could do five worse, I could do ten worse. It’s best to be forgiving.”
“But is that fair to me?”
Carver slid the window open on the other side of the room and sat on the sill. He swung one leg out. “Be satisfied with peace. I could have hurt you today”
“I’m just saying…”
But Carver’s other leg swung over the sill and he slid off. Kapak heard him drop to the grass below, then heard him begin to run. Kapak had already begun moving, sidestepping closer to the master bedroom suite. Now he ran toward it. His bare feet gave him good traction on the slippery floors, and he made it to his bedroom quickly.
Spence or the girl had opened the curtains, so he could see Carver trotting toward the tall, graceful bamboo stalks that swayed in the breeze another hundred feet ahead of him.
Kapak dived onto the bed and rolled to his side to tug open the drawer of his nightstand. He grasped his pistol, nudged the safety off with his right thumb, then did two rolls in the other direction so he would arrive at the window-side of the bed. He swung his legs to get his feet on the floor. Carver was still visible through the nearest of the twelve-foot double-pane windows, and still in possible range. Kapak sprang to his feet and reached for the window latch, but was overcome by a wave of dizziness from all the rolling. He leaned against the wall to steady himself. He knew there wasn’t enough time left to get the big window open, so he took aim at Carver’s back through the glass and fired as Carver disappeared among the twenty-foot bamboo stalks.
Kapak watched as the hole he had blown through his bedroom window seemed to move. His vision wavered a little as cracks shot upward to the top of the window frame and big shards of glass dropped toward the floor.
Kapak stepped back just before the first shards hit the sill and the floor and shattered into a large number of sharp splinters and fragments. Tiny bits of glass flew, spinning in the morning sunlight to flash rainbows and explosions of reflected brightness as their sharp edges stung his face, neck, chest, belly, penis, testicles, thighs. A few little daggers of glass arced upward off the sill, turning to slash at his shins on the way to the tops of his feet.
“Holy shit,” he muttered.
He heard a noise and painfully half-turned to see Spence shoulder the door inward and drop to his knees beyond the bed, sighting down the barrel of a gun at the tortured flesh of Kapak’s glittering chest.
Kapak dropped his gun on the bed and stood still.
“What the fuck?” Spence seemed to intend it as a question.
Kapak looked in the full-length mirror near the head of the bed. His fat, bulbous body was pocked with single droplets of bright red blood. In the sunlight, he could see his skin was powdered with tiny bits of glass from scalp to toenails. “Look what that son of a bitch did.”
Spence stood up, put his gun in his belt, and approached cautiously. “We’d better get you cleaned up. You’ve got to be at that cop’s office in, like, thirty-five minutes.” He plucked a few shards out of Kapak’s bushy eyebrows. “Maybe you can go into the shower again and try to spray the little bits of glass off you with the heavy jets.”
“Good idea. While I’m in there lay out some clothes for me. But keep your eye on that bamboo grove. I don’t want the bastard coming back just because he heard a gun go off” He waddled carefully toward the master bath. “That’s the way he thinks—like everything’s got to be even.” He went inside, closed the door, and locked it.
Spence looked out at the bamboo grove and saw nothing, then hurried to the closet and collected some clothes for Kapak. On the way back he noticed that there was a trail of small blood spots on the carpet. Kapak must have stepped on a sharp piece of glass and not noticed it yet. He set the clothes on the other side of the bed and went to find the first-aid kit.
3
LIEUTENANT SLOSSER WAS IMPATIENT. Ever since his phone call to Manco Kapak, he’d had a peculiar feeling about this. He was almost sure that he was the first person to mention to Kapak that whoever had been driving his two Hummers last night had gotten into trouble in a construction site downtown. It had been the silences, the first indrawn breath, and then the pauses while the man tried to figure out what to say.
Slosser was not sure whether he had made a mistake in telling Kapak so much. Maybe he should have told Kapak to come to the station for a conversation, and then let the news explode in Kapak’s face so he could watch the reaction. It was Slosser’s job to find out all he could about what was going on in the city, and any insight about something as odd as the ruined Hummers might be a big break.
There was nothing Slosser could do about surprising Kapak now, so he concentrated on what he should do next. He had already awakened Kapak, and Kapak was on his way. Slosser had to keep him off-balance. If he wasn’t here by 9:15, Slosser would dispatch three cars to pick him up. No, make that two. Part of the problem with many of the small-time crime bosses in this city was that they began to think they were important. Make that one car to pick him up, and one to wait a block away unseen, not to move in unless there was resistance.