I felt Martinson blanch. “Jesus.”
I tried to put up a front. “Just let me handle this,” I said, without looking at him. Lasko was standing ahead of the group, waiting. Ahead must be the only way out.
We were within thirty feet of them now. Lasko’s face was a mask of controlled anger. Something I didn’t quite understand had pushed his plans awry, and it showed in his face. The two large men fanned out to either side of him, blocking our way. Loring and the guard hung back as if lost.
We got within ten feet and stopped. Lasko stared at us, eyes hard and calculating. The man to his left was bald, and watched us with a greyhound’s watery eyes. The other man was younger, with a mustache and thick brown hair. I wondered if they had guns. No one moved. I wished fiercely that I hadn’t come.
Lasko’s voice rang commandingly in the hall. “You’re very persistent, Mr. Paget, and you don’t pay attention when you should. But you’re not leaving.”
My brain pumped words in some panicky reflex. “We are unless you’re planning a mass murder.” I didn’t like my voice. My mouth felt artificially dry, as if the saliva had been sucked out.
A spark of interest crossed Lasko’s face. “All right. You’ve got my attention.” The carefully controlled voice made it sound as if we were discussing a business decision.
“You should have killed Martinson in the first place. But now I know what he knows.” Which wasn’t true. Lasko’s eyes snapped toward Martinson. But Martinson didn’t, or couldn’t, say anything. “So when you kill Martinson, you have to kill me too. And there’s a Boston cop who knows where I am.”
I shot a glance at Loring. He gaped at the word “murder” like a man listening to a foreign language, hoping he had somehow misheard. I went on. “You can’t trust Loring either. Kill us and the cops will be here tomorrow, poking around. He’s got his license to consider, not to mention his freedom.”
My voice had turned advisory. Lasko paused, as if he could hear my words coming from Catlow’s mouth. The two men at his side were cool and relaxed, waiting for orders. It could go either way, I thought. I was feeling the cold reality; for whatever reason, Lasko wanted us dead.
Lasko picked for words that could never hurt him. “You’re talking nonsense, Mr. Paget,” he said casually. “I doubt the people in your agency have ever authorized this.”
I pointed to the guard. He froze in stupefaction. “The cops will track him down too. So I figure you have to kill four people anyway. I probably left someone out. I saw a couple of nurses a while ago.”
Lasko’s eyes turned inward, as if he were deciding whether to wait. He said nothing more; there were witnesses all around him.
I started walking, steering Martinson to the right. Five feet between me and the mustached man. My stomach felt empty. The mustached man looked back, hand in his pocket, his eyes completely blank. He stepped back three feet, to see Lasko and me at once. We kept moving. The man took in Lasko with the corner of his eyes. Then a signal moved through them.
We reached him. His hand stirred in his pocket. Then he turned sideways. We passed him and turned the corner, heading for the entrance.
Loring stood to our left in an angular slouch, like some lone desiccated bird about to become extinct. We swept by. He stared at his feet.
The inner set of doors was a few feet ahead. Silence behind us. Our footsteps echoed in the corridor. Martinson looked white. My back burned with imagined gunshots.
We burst through the first set of doors. They closed behind us with a slow sigh. I grabbed the outer door. It opened. Fresh air splashed our faces.
We walked to the car and drove away.
Twenty-Nine
“Jesus,” Martinson kept saying. I steered back onto Route 9, my mind on automatic pilot. My hands were clammy, and my mind was numb with disbelief. Martinson was shivering uncontrollably next to me, like a malaria victim.
We rolled through Brookline toward Boston. It was still light out. I was glad; I would have flinched at each taillight in the dark. Martinson was jabbering this and that, about to break into a talking jag. I reached for the car radio, trying to collect my thoughts, but all I got was a folk song that was going nowhere and feeling sorry for itself doing it. I switched it off.
“How did Lasko get there?” Martinson’s voice was blaming me.
“Loring kept me waiting long enough. He probably called him.”
“Then why did he let us go?”
“Two possibilities. One is that Lasko decided to chance beating the Lehman thing and whatever you know, rather than kill someone else. Notice he didn’t say an incriminating word back there. The other is that he’ll take a shot at us, but away from witnesses, so he has some chance to walk away. I wouldn’t mind if you’d keep an eye out the back window.”
“For what?” he asked anxiously.
“For whatever looks like it’s following us.”
“Jesus,” he said again. He turned sideways and rested his chin on top of the car seat. His eyes seemed to strain clear back to the sanitarium.
“What happened?” I asked, as much for diversion as anything else.
“When?”
“Between St. Maarten and now?”
“What’s today?”
“Monday.”
His eyes crinkled. “Last Tuesday morning two guys who were with Lasko show up…”
I interrupted. “The ones from the sanitarium?”
“No, a crew-cut guy and one with a big, puffy nose. They said you were looking for me about the Carib deal. I asked why.” His voice cut loose. “They said never mind why-that I had to take off, right then. I said I didn’t want to-that I wanted to know what the story was. They said Lasko would talk to me later-not to make trouble. I said I wanted to call him. Then they told me I was in trouble too, if I didn’t move. Yeah, and they threatened my wife.” The last sounded like an afterthought. I suspected she always had been.
Martinson stopped to concentrate on the rear window.
“See anything?” I asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Go on.”
“Oh yeah, well, they kind of hauled me to some rented car they had, like a prisoner. The bald one stepped back in the warehouse to talk to a guy named Kendrick.”
“I met him. Why did you hire him, to bite mailmen?”
“They stuck me with him. Anyhow, we drove to the airport. On the way out I was sort of complaining and one guy said I was just going to Boston, to be safe. We drove up to this Lear jet, and they said to call Tracy so she wouldn’t send out a search party. The mustached guy listens to make sure I don’t say anything out of line. I just tell her that I have to leave. The bald guy comes up to talk to his buddy while I’m still on, so I sort of whispered to Tracy that I’d be safe in Boston, so please not to make trouble. I wasn’t supposed to tell Tracy about Boston, and she wasn’t supposed to tell you.” He still sounded aggrieved.
I ignored that. “What happened next?”
“They flew me to Boston, with a stop in Orlando, I think. Anyhow, they took me out to the sanitarium. The room was all set up to be locked from the outside, in an empty wing-you saw it.”
“When did Lasko show up?”
“We got there at night. Lasko came out next morning. He said the Carib deal had some illegal aspects and that I was in it up to my ears. He scared the hell out of me. He can do that.”
“I know.”
“Then he said I just needed to keep my head low for a couple of weeks until he fixed the case. I kept saying I wanted to leave. He got angry then and hinted around that he’d already had Alec Lehman killed. I shut up after that.”
It still shook me. Believing it was bad. But hearing it was worse. “I can see why he was concerned,” I finally said.
His voice tightened. “What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re a witness now.”