He stood to leave, depositing twenty dollars on the table to cover his drink. It smelled like Jim Beam, although it had remained untouched throughout.
“A generous tip for our waitress,” he said. “After all, you seem to feel that she has earned it.”
“Are these men the only ones you’re looking for?” I asked him suddenly. I wanted to know if there were others, and if, perhaps, I was among them.
He crooked his head, like a magpie distracted by an object shining in the sunlight.
“I am always searching,” he said. “There are so many to be dealt with. So many.” He began to drift away. “Perhaps we’ll meet again, for better or worse. It is almost time to be moving on, and I find the thought that you might choose to snap at my heels slightly troubling. It will be for the best if we find a way to coexist in this world. I’m sure that an accommodation can be reached, a bargain struck.”
He walked toward the door, and shadows followed him along the walls. I saw them in the mirror, smears of white on black, just as I had seen the face of John Grady in a mirror once, howling against his own damnation. It was only when the door opened, and sunlight briefly invaded once again, that I saw the envelope that the Collector had left on the seat across from me. I reached for it. It was thin and unsealed. I opened the tab and looked inside. It contained a black-and-white photograph. I took it out and laid it on the table as the door closed behind me, so that there was only the flickering lamplight to illuminate the picture of my house, the clouds gathering above it, and the men standing beside the car in my drive, one tall, black, and severe, the other smaller, smiling in his dishevelment.
I stared at the picture for a time, then put it back in the envelope and tucked it into my jacket pocket. From the kitchen door, the waitress emerged. Her eyes were red. She glanced at me, and I felt the sting of her blame. I left the bar, left Eldritch and his secretary and his office filled with old paper and the names of the dead. I left them all, and I did not return.
As I drove north, Merrick was engaged in his own work. He approached Rebecca Clay’s home. Later, when everything ended in blood and gunfire, a neighbor would recall his presence, but for now he went unnoticed. It was a gift that he had, the ability to blend in when necessary, to avoid attracting attention. He saw the two big men in their enormous truck, and the car owned by the third man parked at the rear of the house. The car was empty, which meant that the man was probably inside. Merrick was sure that he could take him, but there would be noise, and it would draw the others to him. He might be able to kill them as well, but the risk was too great.
Instead, he retreated. He had acquired a new car, boosted from the garage of a summer home at Higgins Beach, and drove it to a warehouse on a decrepit industrial park near Westbrook, and there he found Jerry Legere working alone. He put my gun in Legere’s mouth and informed him that, when it was removed, Legere would tell him all that his wife had shared with him about her father, and all that he knew or suspected about the events leading up to Daniel Clay’s disappearance, or he would blow the back of his head off. Legere was certain that he was going to die. He told Merrick about his wife, the whore. He peddled fantasies to him: lies and half lies, untruths half-believed, and truths that were worth less than the lies.
But Merrick learned nothing useful from him, and he did not kill Rebecca Clay’s ex-husband, because Legere gave him no cause to do so. Merrick drove away, leaving Legere lying in the dirt, crying with shame and relief.
And the man who was watching from the woods took in everything and began making his calls.
Chapter XXVII
I was heading north on I-95 when the call came through. It was Louis. When he had returned to Scarborough, there was an unknown car waiting in my driveway. A couple of phone conversations later, and it was not unknown any longer.
“You got company up here,” he said.
“Anyone we know?”
“Not unless you planning on invading Russia.”
“How many?”
“Two.”
“Where?”
“Sitting slap bang in your yard. Apparently, there ain’t no Russian word for ‘subtle.’”
“Keep an eye on them. I’ll let you know when I’m coming off Route I.”
I guessed they’d be around asking questions eventually. They couldn’t let Demarcian’s death pass without mention or investigation. I had just hoped that I’d already be gone when they arrived.
I didn’t know much about the Russians, except for the little I’d learned from Louis in the past and what I’d read in the papers. I knew that they were big in California and New York and that the main groups in each of those places maintained contact with their peers in Massachusetts, Chicago, Miami, New Jersey, and a dozen or more other states, as well as their peers back in Russia, to form what was, in effect, a huge criminal syndicate. Like the individual mobs themselves, it appeared to be loosely structured, with little apparent organization, but it was believed that this was a ruse to throw investigators off the scent and make it difficult for them to infiltrate the syndicate. The soldiers were separated from the bosses by layers of buffers, so that those involved in drugs and prostitution at street level had little idea where the money they earned ultimately went. Demarcian had probably not been able to tell Merrick very much about the men with whom he dealt beyond first names, and those were unlikely to have been real anyway.
The Russians also seemed content to leave large-scale narcotics dealing to others, although they were said to have formed links with the Colombians. Mostly, they preferred insurance scams, identity theft, money laundering, and fuel tax fraud, the kind of complex rip-off operations that were hard for the authorities to track and prosecute. I wondered how many of the clients for Demarcian’s porn sites realized the kind of individuals to whom they were revealing their credit card details.
I figured they were here only to ask questions. If they’d come for something more serious, they wouldn’t have been dumb enough to park in my driveway and wait for me to arrive. Then again, that presupposed they gave a damn about their car being noticed or even about potential witnesses. The Russians were bad news. It was said that when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Italians sent a few guys over to Moscow to assess the potential for muscling in on the emerging market. They took one look at what was happening on the streets and went straight back home. Unfortunately, the Russians followed them back, joining the Odessa Mafia that had been operating in Brighton Beach since the midseventies, and now the Italians sometimes seemed almost quaint by comparison with the new arrivals. It was kind of ironic, I thought, that what ultimately brought the Russians to our door was not communism, but capitalism. Joe McCarthy must have been turning in his grave.
I reached Scarborough forty minutes later, and I called Louis when I was at Oak Hill. He asked me to give him five minutes, then head down at a steady thirty. I saw the car as soon as I rounded the bend. It was a big black Chevy 4x4, the kind of vehicle usually driven by people who would cry if they got real dirt on it. As if to confirm the stereotype, the Chevy was scrupulously clean. I did a U-turn as I passed my house and pulled up behind the Chevy with the passenger door closest to it, effectively blocking it from leaving the drive. It was bigger than the Mustang, and if they got enough power behind it they might manage to knock my car out of their way, but in the process they’d probably wipe out the back of their vehicle. Apparently, nobody had yet thought of putting bull bars on the rear of 4x4s, although I was sure that it could only be a matter of time. Both front doors of the Chevy opened, and two men emerged. They were dressed in standard hood chic: black leather jackets, black jeans, and black sweaters. One of them, a bald man built like a piece of Eastern Bloc architecture, was reaching inside his jacket for his gun when a voice behind him said only a single word: “Don’t.”