“Billy?”
“Shut up,” he said.
“Billy… I’m bleeding real bad.”
He closed the valise, snapped the locks shut.
“I have to get to a hospital,” she said.
The telephone rang. He picked up the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Walker?”
The good-looking broad who ran the place.
“Yeah?”
“Your taxi’s here, sir.”
“I’ll be right up, ask him to wait.”
He put the phone back on the cradle.
“Billy?”
“Shut up,” he said.
“Help me. Please.”
Like fun, he thought.
“Billy?” she said.
Help you and that fucking lunatic’ll come after me!
“Billy?” she said.
But he was already gone.
Names stenciled in black on the concrete curbing for each parking space.
FRANK SUMMERVILLE and alongside that MATTHEW HOPE.
A brown Mercedes Benz in the Summerville space.
Tan Karmann Ghia in the Hope space.
The blue Honda was parked across the street. Hurley sat behind the wheel, watching the building. Summerville and Hope. Law Offices. 333 Heron Street. At a little before two-thirty. Hurley saw him coming out of the building and walking toward the Ghia.
Good, he thought. Now we’re in the open, Mr. Hope. Now we see where you’re going and we take care of you, Mr. Hope, we dance you around the block, sweetheart, we take you out.
He nodded curtly and started the car.
First the police coming by shortly after she’d got back here this morning, driving off with the two men. Then both of them coming back in a taxi around twelve-thirty or thereabouts. Then the older one driving off in the Honda at a little past one. And now the young one going off in a taxi. Which left only the pregnant girl over there in the cabin.
Irene looked at the motel register again.
Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Hurley.
Mr. William Harold Walker.
Said he was the girl’s brother.
In this business, you didn’t ask too many questions. Not if you wanted to make a living. Rented them the cabin at the going rate for three, wouldn’t have cared if they were planning a circus in there, two of them on a pregnant woman, one on top, one underneath, in this business it was Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies. Yes, sir, Mr. Hurley, I hope you and your wife and your brother-in-law enjoy the accommodations, you can get a good hearty breakfast in the diner across 41. Let them come, do what they had to do, and then let them go. No skin off Irene’s nose. This was a business.
But—
Matthew Hope had been interested in these people.
This morning, when she was still at his house, he’d received a phone call from someone, and then he’d asked about the crowd in cabin number eleven, the Hurley party, and then he’d told whoever was on the other end of the line that Hurley and Walker had been spotted watching the Parrish house and that it might be a good idea to look them up, and oh, by the way, Hurley has a record.
And then he’d said one of them might have killed Jonathan Parrish, or words to that effect, and next thing you knew the cops were on her doorstep — well, not exactly the very next thing, since it had taken her and Matthew a little while to make love again. But soon after she’d got back to the motel, here came the cops, and off they went with both of them, one of whom had a record.
She wondered why the cops had let them go.
Especially the one with the record.
She wondered if she should call Matthew to tell him the cops had let them go.
A man with a record.
Tell Matthew they were both gone now. Hurley gone in the Honda, Walker off in a taxi. Carrying a suitcase. When he called the office, he said he needed a taxi. She asked him if he wanted any particular company. He said he didn’t care, so long as they could get him to the airport. So William Walker was gone for sure, and only God knew where Arthur Hurley was, though she suspected he’d be back to pick up his pregnant wife if, in fact, she was his wife. Irene had once rented a cabin to a pregnant one-legged woman and her husband, supposedly, but it turned out they were a working girl and her pimp. The lady turned a trick an hour, regular cavalcade of cars pulling into the parking lot every hour on the hour. When the couple checked out a week later, they probably went to Lake Como, Italy, for a vacation. In this business you never knew what—
The telephone rang.
Irene glanced at the switchboard.
Unit number eleven.
“Office,” she said, “good afternoon.”
An odd sound on the other end of the line.
“Hello?” Irene said.
The sound again.
Wet. And gurgling.
“Mrs. Hurley?” Irene said. “Is that you?”
And then her voice.
A single word.
“Please.”
The man who came through the door in the walnut-paneled wall behind the receptionist’s desk smiled and extended his hand.
“Mr. Hope?” he said. “I’m Henry Curtis, Miss Brechtmann’s secretary.”
“Nice to meet you,” Matthew said, and shook hands with him.
Curtis looked at the card Matthew had given the receptionist.
“Summerville and Hope,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You’re an attorney.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Has someone found another snake in our beer?” Curtis asked, smiling.
Matthew wondered why he thought a snake in their beer was comical.
“Or a rusty nail? Or a nest of scorpions? Or a used condom?”
He glanced quickly toward the reception desk, where a gray-haired woman sat doing a crossword puzzle.
“We have a battery of attorneys who do nothing but defend the company against claims of foreign objects found floating in our beer. One of these days, someone’s going to claim he spotted the Loch Ness monster in one of our bottles,” Curtis said, and smiled again.
Matthew suddenly liked him.
“I know you have an appointment…” Curtis said.
“Yes. I spoke to Miss Brechtmann on the phone earlier to…”
“Yes, I know. But I’m afraid her meeting’s running a little long. She asked me to make you comfortable while you wait.”
“How long will she be, do you know?”
“Oh, it shouldn’t take too long,” Curtis said. “I thought I might show you through the brewery…”
“That long, huh?”
“Well, however long, it’ll help pass the time. Unless you’d prefer reading back issues of trade journals.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I didn’t think you would. Mrs. Hoskins,” he said, “we’ll be walking through. Send someone to find us when Miss Brechtmann is free, would you?”
“Yes, Mr. Curtis,” the woman said, and went back to her crossword puzzle.
Irene opened the door with her passkey.
At first she didn’t see anyone.
“Mrs. Hurley?” she said.
No answer.
“Mrs. Hurley, where…?”
The phone was on a night table alongside the bed farthest from the door. The receiver was off the cradle. Irene walked quickly across the room and around the bed, and saw—
“Oh, Jesus,” she said.
The girl was lying in a puddle of blood.
Irene stepped around her and picked up the telephone receiver.
Hurley read the sign and then walked right on past it and through the gate. Way to do it with signs, you ignored them completely. You didn’t stop and read them carefully as if this was the first time you were here, you just took them in with a single glance and then ignored them. Of course you were authorized personnel, and you were going beyond this point and beyond any fucking point you felt like.