Part 14 (1/2)
”How do I know Ruffi will be where you say he'll be? How do I know you'll ever come back?”
”You go through this world looking for guarantees, McGee, you'll live small.”
”Where is he?”
”Money in hand, and I tell you.”
”Half the money in hand until I see him.”
He thought it over for a slow ten count and then said, ”Let's give it a shot.”
Eighteen I HAD been planning on turning the rental Buick in after breakfast. But Cappy said he would not ride in that crazy Rolls pickup of mine. He said Dean had told him about it. He said it was too conspicuous. He took a pair of very dark sungla.s.ses out of his purse and put them on and asked me if I had a hat he could use. He said he had lost his in the night, running down an alley. I found him an old white canvas fis.h.i.+ng hat with a Sherlock Holmes shape. He pulled it well down on his head.
”b.u.t.ton up the s.h.i.+rt,” I said, ”and take off the jewelry.”
”I never b... Oh, h.e.l.l yes. It's hard to keep from being stupid.”
After I got him into the car, I said I had forgotten to get the key to my box. I knew he would stay put. He got edgy whenever he was out in the open. I got the ten in hundreds. Divided the pack into two parts and inserted them into the two flat black packets that Velcro neatly just below my knees.
I drove to the branch bank near the marina where I have a safety-deposit box. I left him in the car in the lot and after the girl helped me unlock the little door, I carried my box into one of their little phone-booth rooms. I have it only because there are a few little items I would not care to have sunk or burned. Pictures of my mother and father and brother, all long gone. Birth certificate. Army discharge. Some yellowed clippings of my brief prowess as a tight end before they spoiled my knees. One theater ribbon, one Purple Heart, one Silver Star with citation for Sergeant McGee. A smiling photograph of Gretel Howard, another of Puss Killian, a few-a very few-letters, a copy of my will, which Meyer keeps telling me should not be in a safety-deposit box. I took the brown envelope in which the will had been, and put the hundred hundreds into it, a stack not an inch thick.
When I got back to the car he looked asleep with his hand over his eyes, but when I opened the door on my side, the blued muzzle of an automatic pistol flicked up and stared at me across his thigh. Then it was gone and he straightened up and said, ”Sorry, pal. I thought I saw visitors. Got it?”
”Put away the gun.”
”Sure.”
”Here it is. Count it.”
He held it well below the dash, below the level of his knees. He took two bills out at random, bent forward and examined them very carefully. He sighed, smiled, put them back in the envelope and slid the envelope into the zippered pocket on the back of the brown leather shoulder bag.
”Keep much in the box?”
”Millions,” I said. ”Untold millions.” I've never kept money in the box. Money is expendable. It can always be replaced, one way or another.
”My problem was keeping too much in the box and not enough around loose. But who'd think things would get so jammed up I'm like on some kind of a list?”
”Where to?”
”What we've got to do is get a look at him. You, not me. So you know it's him. We have to do it without making him jumpy, or he'll run, G.o.d knows where. It isn't going to be easy. He's maybe up to twenty or thirty lines a day. That's how he got into all this. That stuff makes you think you can do anything and get away with it. He's using enough to make him very hard to figure, but not enough to make him easy to take. Years ago he used to be not too bad of a little kid. But they gave him the moon and the stars. The oldest kid, the favorite.”
”Where to?”
”We're going to have to work out something. I won't tell you where, but I'll tell you what. What you've got is an asphalt two-lane road running along the side of a ca.n.a.l. No trees growing close to the ca.n.a.l. Then you've got a wooden bridge that is kind of a hump that crosses the ca.n.a.l. The ca.n.a.l is maybe fifteen feet wide, I don't know how deep. There's a one-story frame house on the other side of the plank bridge, set back twenty or thirty feet. It's got an aluminum carport on one side, big enough for one car. In back of the cottage and on either side is like jungle. Maybe there's a way back through there. I never tried. At night there's a big bright barn light fastened to the front of the house, lights up the whole place. It's got electric and a telephone.”
”How do you know so much about it?”
”I stayed there waiting for a man to come home. He was doing ten to life in Raiford and they let him out in a little over six. That was last year. I don't want to get into all the whys and wherefores. Put it this way. It was the kind of scene you have to do it yourself and not put somebody else on it. So I was there with his wife and kid, waiting. It took him four days to get home. She was scared out of her wits he'd be too much for me. She hated the b.a.s.t.a.r.d. We kept the kid out of school. The kid had her orders-the minute he arrives, she shuts herself in her room. It went quick and easy and the woman and me, we dragged him way back into the saw gra.s.s and water and palmetto and slid him into a gator pond and put cement blocks on him to hold him down. Then we let the kid out and they hugged each other and they both cried, but they weren't crying for old Daddy. They were crying for happy.”
”Ruffi's there now?”
”He lets her go shopping while he stays with the kid. She's eleven years old. The woman hasn't dared try anything. I left her my phone number last year. Nice woman. She phoned me from the supermarket ten miles down the road, asked for help. She said he was starting to mess with her kid. I said I'd try, but I didn't tell her that right at that point in time I was trying to figure some way of getting out of my place without getting myself killed. It was staked out very tight. That was yesterday.”
”How did she know his name?”
”She didn't. I asked her what he looks like. She told me and said he came in a white Mercedes convertible and it is in her carport with tarps hiding it. It's Ruffi.”
”So why don't you go take care of him and pick up his cash?”
”First, because I happen to know he got out without hardly any. It cost him what he was carrying to bribe his way out. Second, I don't know if I could take him. It's hard to tell what a nutcake will do next. And Ruffi is quick and tricky. And he's the one sent me there last year, so he knew the layout.”
”So why don't you make a phone call and sell the information?”
”The people that want Ruffi don't buy information from dead people. I'm on the list, so I'm dead. There's some others on the list too, running like h.e.l.l, or holed up someplace.”
”Why did you come to me?”
”Jesus H. Christ, McGee! I happened to find out you told Art Jornalero about Ruffi cutting throats down there in the Keys, and that's what started the whole s.h.i.+t storm. I heard you want him. How should I know? Maybe he killed friends of yours. People living around on boats, the kind of rent you have to pay at places like Pier 66 and Bahia Mar, you have to have some money. I knew where to find you from when they told me you should have an accident.”
”What kind?”
”Dean was in charge. He was going to work something out.”
”What's the woman's name?”
”Irina Casak. The kid is Angie. The RFD box is out by the road next to the bridge. It says Casak on it in red paint.”
”What name does she know you by?”
”Good question. Maybe the way you took my guys out, it wasn't all dumb luck. She knew me as Ben Smith.”
”What kind of car does she have?”
”Last year it was a yellow Volkswagen bug, pretty beat up. Maybe she's got the same one now. I don't know. Do you know him by sight?”
”From a publicity still. I wouldn't forget the eyelashes.”
”So what we got now, McGeer I take you there and we have to figure out some way you get a look at him without stampeding him. You're satisfied, we come back and you loan me the other ten and I give you the name you can sell him to. You'll have to work out your own arrangements to keep from getting screwed on the payoff. Done right, you'll end up smelling like roses.”
So we went to take a look. It took an hour and forty minutes to get there, first south and then west. A lonely road on the edge of the Glades. Lumpy asphalt running string-straight through wetlands past wooded hammocks where the white birds sat on bare trees like Christmas doodads, thinking white bird thoughts.
He told me when to start slowing. We cruised past the bridge and the mailbox at a sedate thirty-five. I saw a yellow beetle pulled halfway into the carport on the left side of the frame house. The house was gray with green trim, and I had a glimpse of a broken rocking chair on the shallow porch, bed springs in the side yard, a swing made of a tire.
”Same car as before, parked in front of his,” Cappy said.