Cat pulled the H&K automatic from its shoulder holster.
Denny’s face had shaped itself into a mask of disbelief. He suddenly stopped screaming. “You motherfucker!” he spat at his tormentor. “I can’t feel nothing in... shit, I can’t move my legs!”
Cat made a show of removing the clip from the pistol, inspecting it, then shoving it back into the handle. “That’s because you’re a paraplegic now.”
“Who the hell are you?” Denny gabbled. “Why are you doing this to me?”
Cat took the silencer from his pocket and began screwing it into the pistol’s barrel. “You’ve got a short memory, Denny,” he said. “We met a few months ago — back when I owned a little yacht called Catbird, back when I had a wife and a daughter. I gave you a lift to Panama, remember? Of course we never made it...”
Denny’s face collapsed into a paradigm of fear, and he began trying to pull himself across the floor with his hands, dragging his useless legs behind him.
Cat grabbed him by the collar, dragged him back, and propped him up in a corner. “Don’t leave me, Denny. You left me last time, when you thought you’d killed me with my own shotgun, after you’d murdered my wife and that girl. Who was she, anyway? Why did you kill her and leave her there?”
Denny stared at him speechlessly.
Cat brought the silencer sharply across the bridge of his nose, breaking it. Blood spurted over Denny’s shirt. “Tell me about it, or I’ll keep hurting you,” Cat said.
“She was Pedro’s old lady,” Denny blubbered, now incredibly anxious to please. “He was sick of her, and he thought it seemed like a good time to unload her. She’d been threatening to go to the cops about the coke he’d been dealing.”
“Well, that was real clear thinking, wasn’t it? Just blow her head half off, and leave her to sink with me, my wife, and Catbird.” Cat grabbed him by the hair and banged his head against the wall. “What did you do to Jinx? Why won’t she speak anything but Spanish?”
Denny cried out and grabbed his head with both hands. “I didn’t do anything to her, I swear to God. I didn’t even screw her! The Anaconda wanted ’em fresh! But she wouldn’t talk at all, wouldn’t even answer to her name. Me and Pedro got her to Cartagena, and she was just curled up like a baby in the back of the boat all the way. She refused to speak for weeks. The Anaconda had this woman looking after her all the time; she just kept talking to her in Spanish. And finally, when she started to come around, she wouldn’t speak anything but Spanish. I swear to God, I didn’t do nothing to her!”
“No,” Cat said, pointing the pistol at Denny, “nothing but murder her parents and leave them on a sinking boat, and sell her to a sadistic maniac who—” Cat stopped himself from thinking what Prince could have done to Jinx that made her want to separate herself from her identity, to the point where she refused even to speak her own language. “You slimy little bastard,” Cat said quietly to Denny. He worked the action of the pistol, pumping a round into the chamber.
“Oh, Jesus,” Denny whimpered, “please don’t... oh, Jesus.”
“It’s a little late for you and Jesus, Denny,” Cat said quietly. “Tonight, you sleep in hell.” Cat waited a moment for that to sink into Denny’s brain, then he followed it with a single shot to the forehead. The pistol made a noise like a hand slapping the side of a leather suitcase. Denny made a little sighing sound, and his head slumped to the right. Cat shot him again in the temple.
Cat stared at the corpse for just a moment, then walked quickly to the door and looked up and down the hallway. The merriment was continuing in the disco, and the hall was empty. Cat went back and grabbed Denny’s body by a wrist, pulled it away from the wall, and got it up and slung onto his hip. Walking in a half-crouch, he peered into the hallway, then carried the body quickly to the pantry. Inside, he got the light on, then carried Denny to the nearly empty bean barrel. With some effort, he got the body into the barrel, feet first, and forced it into something like the fetal position. Then he rolled the barrel out a few feet, rolled the full barrel into its place, then rolled Denny’s barrel to where the full barrel had been. He took a large scoop from he shelf above the barrels and began shoveling dried beans from the full barrel into the barrel containing the corpse. Soon, Denny’s barrel was full to the brim, and the corpse had disappeared under the beans.
Cat switched off the light and stepped back into the hallway. Nothing had changed. He went back to the men’s room, took some paper towels, and wiped the blood from the tiled wall. Then he rolled a waste container from under the sink and placed it on the spot where the carpet was bloody.
He stood back and surveyed the scene. With a little luck, nobody would know for a while that a man had been murdered here. Not, at least, until somebody ate a lot more beans. Cat walked past the cheering crowd and left the building, mopping the sweat from his face and neck. He loosened his collar and started toward the cottage. He had just killed a man, and he wondered why he didn’t feel terrible about it. He didn’t feel elated; he hadn’t actually enjoyed shooting Denny, but still he had the feeling of satisfaction that comes when something important has been accomplished.
He didn’t feel finished, though. There was another task to complete: Prince. Before dawn that morning, he would turn on Barry Hedger’s marvelous little radio, and an hour or two later the skies would rain helicopters and troops. By that time, he would be barricaded into Prince’s apartment with Jinx, Meg, and Dell. By that time, Prince would be dead. Cat wondered if he could find a slower way to accomplish that than he had with Denny.
He reached the cottage and went inside. To his surprise, Meg was not asleep; she was sitting in a chair in the living room, and every light in the place was on. She looked very odd. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“When I came home, the place had been ransacked,” she said. “It doesn’t look it, but it has been very carefully ransacked.”
Cat looked around the room. It seemed perfectly normal to him. “Was anything taken?” he asked. “Did they take your camera or tapes?”
Meg shook her head. “I think I must have surprised him. The bedroom window was open. Only two things are missing, as far as I can tell.”
“What two things?”
“Well, he found the false bottom in your bag; Bluey’s pistol is gone.”
“What else?”
Meg sighed. “Barry Hedger’s radio,” she said.
32
“The question is, who took it?” Meg said.
“It doesn’t much matter who took it,” Cat replied. “Without it, we’re fucked. There’s no way to call in the raid.”
“Sure, that’s plain enough, but it matters a hell of a lot who took it. I mean, if it was just a simple burglary, that’s one thing. If Prince had the cottage searched, that’s quite another.”
She had a point. “You’re right. If Prince finds out what that radio is, we’re dead. We’ve got to report it stolen.”
“Isn’t that just going to attract a lot of attention?”
“Sure, but if we report it, and if it was a burglary, then we have some chance of getting it back without Prince’s finding out what it is. On the other hand, if Prince had the place searched, then it can’t hurt to report it, since he already knows. It might look bad if we didn’t. There’s always the chance that he’s got it and doesn’t know what it is.”
“Okay,” Meg said, “we report it and see what happens. Anyway, I think this is a straight burglary; one of the staff, maybe.”
“I hope you’re right, but even if it is, unless we can get the radio back—”