Hard as Nails

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

The Dodger didn't mind waiting. He was good at it. He'd done it for years in the bughouse in Rochester—just sitting, reptile-like, not even staring, waiting for nothing and knowing that nothing was coming. It had served him well in the years since, running chores for the Boss, waiting for targets to finish whatever they were doing and to come to him. He didn't mind waiting here for the P.I. who might or might not come, who might or might not still be alive.

He left the lights off, of course. After making sure that his entrance hadn't triggered any alarms, the Dodger took thick, clear tape from his pack and covered the small circle he'd cut from the window. It was already chilly in the abandoned inn, but this Kurtz might feel a draft when he came in downstairs. Ex-cons were always sensitive to changes in their cages.

Using the small, shielded penlight from his pack, the Dodger had gone through the entire three stories and seventeen rooms of the moldering old hotel. He'd found Kurtz's sleeping area and odd little library room, of course, but he'd also found the subtle tripwires and telltales in the triangular room on the first floor, and the two hiding places for weapons on the second—the empty niche over the door molding in the room next to Kurtz's sleeping room, and an even more clever nook under the floor of the coldest, most broken-down back room. Kurtz had hidden a 9mm Colt and ammunition in plastic wrap and oily rags there. The Dodger took the gun and went back to the front upstairs room—staying out of the light of the flickering black-and-white monitors—to wait.

And Kurtz did not come. And Kurtz still did not come. The Dodger began imagining all the ways the Major might have killed the P.I. and his top-heavy cop girlfriend. But he hoped he hadn't The Dodger wanted Kurtz to come home. But still he did not come.

It was sometime after ten-thirty that the Dodger's phone vibrated against his leg. He answered it with a whispered, "Yeah," his eyes still on the video monitors showing the rain-slicked streets and walls outside.

"Where are you?" It was the Boss.

"At the P.I.'s." The Dodger tried not to lie to the Boss. The Boss had ways of knowing when the Dodger lied.

"Kurtz's?"

"Yeah."

"Is he there?"

"Not yet."

The Dodger heard the Boss expell a breath. He hated it when the Boss grew angry at him. "Never mind the P.I.," said the Boss. "You need to get up to the shopping mall in Niagara Falls. We don't want you to miss our foreign friend."

It took a second for the Dodger to remember that the Boss was talking about the woman coining across the border tonight. "Plenty of time," whispered the Dodger. He didn't need to meet her until midnight And he didn't want her body lying in his pest control van longer than it had to.

"No, go now," said the Boss. "You can wait up there. Then you're off duty for a whole day and night."

"Yeah," said the Dodger, smiling as he thought about tomorrow.

"Happy Birthday," said the Boss. "I'll have something special for you when I see you on Tuesday."

"Thanks, Boss," said the Dodger. He was always touched by the Boss's gifts. Every year it was something special, something the Dodger would never have thought to get for himself.

"Go on now," said the Boss. "Get going."

"Okay, Boss." The Dodger broke the connection, lifted his pack, slipped the Beretta and its silencer into his specially rigged holster, and left the Harbor Inn by the window and fire escape on the north, where he had dismantled Kurtz's simple alarms.

Twelve miles away, in the mostly Polish and Italian section of the suburb of Cheektowaga, Arlene DeMarco was preparing to head for the closed Niagara Falls shopping mall to pick up the girl named Aysha. It was only ten minutes after ten P.M., but Arlene believed in arriving early for important things.

She took 190 up and around, over Grand Island, across the toll bridge, and hooked left onto the Moses Expessway past the tower of mist declaring the American Falls and right into the city of Niagara Falls. There was almost no traffic this next-to-last night of October. The rain had stopped but Arlene had to use her Buick's wipers to clear her windshield of the spray from the Falls.

Having grown up in Buffalo, Arlene had seen Niagara Falls, New York, go from being a comfortable, kitschy old place reflecting the roadhouses and dowdy tourist hotels of mid-century America to being a heap of rubble resembling Berlin after WWII—almost everything leveled for urban restoration—before finally becoming the convention-center wasteland it was today. If you wanted to see a pretty and classy and up-to-date city of Niagara Falls, you had to cross the Rainbow Bridge to the Canadian side.

But Arlene didn't care about urban planning this night. She drove down Niagara Street to the Rainbow Centre Mall just a block from the double-wasteland of the Information Center and Convention Center, surrounded by their moats of empty parking lots. The Rainbow Centre Mall had a smaller parking area, with just a sprinkling of vehicles in it this Sunday night—cars belonging to the custodial crews and security people, no doubt. But a retaining wall blocked this part of the lot from the view of the street—from the view of any passing police vehicles late on a Sunday night, she realized—and Joe's instructions had been to wait for the girl, Aysha, to be dropped off near the main, north doors of the mall here.

Arlene patted her large purse, checking for the fifth or sixth time that the big Magnum revolver was in there. It was. She'd felt foolish taking it from the office, but Joe had rarely sent her out on tasks like this, and although she vaguely understood this Yemeni girl's connection to recent events, she wasn't at all clear as to what the other factors might be. Arlene just knew that Joe was doing something important tonight if he was sending her to pick up Aysha. So while Arlene wasn't alarmed or unduly nervous, she did have the loaded pistol in her purse, along with a can of Mace, her cell phone, her former and illegally but convincingly updated ID showing her to be a member of the Erie County District Attorney's office—as well as the carry permit for the Magnum. She also had some fresh fruit, two water bottles, a pack of Marlboros, her trusty Bic lighter, a small Yemeni-English dictionary she'd picked up yesterday with some difficulty, a Thermos of coffee, and the better and smaller of the two pairs of binoculars from the office.

Arlene took her time choosing where to wait—she didn't want to be spotted by a mall security patrol and picked up—and finally decided on a spot far back near the Dumpsters, between two old cars that had obviously been parked there all night She settled in, lowered the window, and lit a Marlboro.

It was about twenty minutes later, just about eleven P.M., when the van entered the parking lot, circled once—Arlene slid low in her seat, out of sight—and then parked near the four workers' cars closer to the front door of the silent mall. Because the vehicle was at right angles to Arlene's Buick, she was able to use the binoculars to check it out.

It was a pest control van. On its side was a cartoon of a long-nosed insect gasping and falling in a cartoon cloud of pesticide. The driver had not emerged. His face was in shadow, but Arlene kept the binoculars trained on his silhouette until he leaned forward over the steering wheel to peer at the shopping mall, and for a moment the tall, mall lights illuminated him clearly.

For an instant, Arlene thought that the man's face was wildly tattooed or covered with white streaks and swirls. Then she realized that it was covered with burn scars. He was wearing a baseball cap, but his eyes caught the sodium vapor lamps and seemed to glow orangely, like a cat's.

As Arlene sat there, transfixed, the binoculars steady, the burned man's head suddenly turned her way—swiveling as smoothly as an owl's—and he stared directly at her.