He signaled the waiter for the check, drank the last of the wine, and stood up. He pulled a handful of change from his pocket and went toward the pay telephone in a corridor at the back of the restaurant.
The waiter brought the check on a saucer, and I turned it over and read the amount and gave the waiter a credit card. Before the waiter returned with the charge slip, Ransom came charging back toward the table. He grabbed my arm. "This is—this is unbelievable. They think she might be coming out of her coma. Where's the check?"
"I gave him a card."
"You can't do that," he said. "Don't be crazy. I want to pay the thing and get over there."
"Go to the hospital, John. I'll walk back to your house and wait for you."
"Well, how much was it?" He dug in his trousers pockets for something, then rummaged in the pockets of his suit jacket.
"I already paid. Take off."
He gave me a look of real exasperation and fished a key from his jacket pocket and held it out without giving it to me. "That was an expensive bottle of wine. And my entree cost twice as much as yours." He looked at the key as if he had forgotten it, then handed it to me. "I still say you can't pay for this dinner."
"You get the next one," I said.
He was almost hopping in his eagerness to get to the hospital, but he saw the waiter coming toward us with the credit card slip and leaned over my shoulder to see the amount while I figured out the tip and signed. "You tip too much," he said. "That's on your head."
"Will you get away?" I said, and pushed him toward the door.
14
Apart from two UI students in T-shirts and shorts walking into a bar called Axel's Tuxedo, the sidewalks outside Jimmy's were empty. John Ransom was moving quickly away from me, swinging his arms and going north along Berlin Avenue to Shady Mount, and as he went from relative darkness into the bright lights beneath the Royal's marquee, his lightweight suit changed color, like a chameleon's hide.
In two or three seconds Ransom passed back into the darkness on the other side of the marquee. A car started up on the opposite side of the street. Ransom was about fifty feet away, still clearly in sight, moving quickly and steadily through the pools of yellow light cast by the street lamps.
I turned around to go up the block and saw a blue car move away from the curb across the street. For a second I stopped moving, aware that something had caught in my memory. Just before the car slid into the light spilling out from the Royal's marquee, I had it: the same car had pulled over to the curb on Eastern Shore Drive so that we would be out of sight when Sarah Spence Youngblood drove into Tom Pasmore's driveway. Then light from the movie theater fell on the car, and instead of Sarah Youngblood, a man with big shoulders and long gray hair pulled back into a ponytail sat behind the wheel. The light caught the dot of a gold earring in his left ear. It was the man I had almost bumped into at the hospital pay phones. He had followed us to Tom Pasmore's house, then to Jimmy's, and now he was following John to the hospital.
And since I had seen him first at the hospital, he must have followed us there, too. I turned to watch the blue car creep down the street.
The driver bumped along behind John. Whenever his target got too far in front of him, he nudged the car out into the left lane and slowly rolled forward another twenty or thirty feet before cutting back into the curb. If there had been much other traffic, he would not have been noticeable in any way.
I walked along behind him, stopping when he stopped. I could hear the soles of Ransom's shoes ticking against the sidewalks. The man in the blue car swung away from the curb and purred along the nearly empty street, tracking him like a predator.
Still hurrying along, Ransom was now only a block from the hospital, moving in and out of the circles of light on the sidewalk. The man in the blue car pulled out of an unlighted spot and rolled down the street. He surprised me by going right past Ransom. I thought he had seen me in his rearview mirror and swore at myself for not even getting his license number. Then he surprised me again and swung into the curb across the street from the hospital. I saw his head move as he found John Ransom in his side mirror.
I started walking faster.
Ransom turned into the narrow path between tall hedges that led up to the visitors' entrance at Shady Mount. The door of the blue car opened, and the driver got out. He pushed the door shut behind him and began to amble across the street. He was about my height, and he walked with a slightly tilted-back swagger. The apostrophe of gray hair jutted out from his head and fell against his back. His big shoulders swung, and the loose jacket of the suit billowed a little. I saw that his hips were surprisingly wide and that his belly was heavy and soft. The way he moved, his hips floating, made him look like he was swimming through the humid air.
I got my notebook out of my pocket and wrote down the number of his license plate. The blue car was a Lexus. He stepped up onto the sidewalk and turned into the path. He had given John Ransom enough time to get into an elevator. I walked down the block as quickly as I could, and by the time I turned into the path, he was just letting the visitors' door close behind him. I jogged up the path and came through the door while he was still floating along toward the elevator. I went across the nearly empty lobby and touched him on the shoulder.
He looked over his shoulder to see who had touched him. His face twitched with irritation, and he turned around to face me. "Something I can help you with?" he said. His voice was unadulterated Millhaven, fiat, choppy, and slightly nasal.
"Why are you following John Ransom?" I asked.
He sneered at me—only half of his face moved. "You must be outa your mind."
He started to turn away, but I caught his arm. "Who told you to follow Ransom?"
"And who the hell are you?"
I told him my name.
He looked around the lobby. Two of the clerks behind the long desk sat unnaturally still at their computer keyboards, pretending not to be eavesdropping. The man frowned and led me away from the elevators, toward the far side of the lobby and a row of empty chairs. Then he squared off in front of me and looked me up and down. He was trying to decide how to handle me.
"If you really want to help this guy Ransom, I think you should go back to wherever you came from," he said finally.
"Is that a threat?"
"You really don't understand," he said. "I got nothing to do with you." He wheeled around and started moving fast toward the visitors' entrance.
"Maybe one of these nervous clerks should call the police."
He whirled to confront me. His face was an unhealthy red. "You want police? Listen, you asshole, I'm with the police."
He reached into his back pocket and came out with a fat black wallet. He flipped it open to show me one of the little gold badges given to officers' wives and contributors to police causes.
"That's impressive," I said.
He stuck his broad forefinger into my chest, hard, and pushed his big face toward me. "You don't know what you're messing with, you stupid fuck."
Then he marched past me and out the door. I walked after him and watched him jam the wallet back into his pants on the way down the walk between the hedges. He moved across the street without bothering to look for other cars. He pulled open the door of the Lexus, bent down, and squeezed himself in. He slammed the door, started the car, and looked out of the open window to see me watching him. His face seemed to fill the entire space of the window. He twitched the car out into Berlin Avenue and roared off.
I walked off the sidewalk and watched his taillights diminish as he moved away. The brake lights flashed as he stopped at a traffic light two blocks down. The Lexus went another block north on Berlin Avenue and then turned left without bothering to signal. There was no other car on the street, and the night seemed huge and black.