Hidden prey

Chapter 17

Grandpa was burning with anxiety when Carl arrived after school, said, "Where have you been?"

"School… we had choir practice," Carl said. Grandpa's house smelled of years of spaghetti and red spaghetti sauce and mushrooms; and old cigarette smoke, cooked into the walls for decades, ending, Carl was told, just after he was born. "I heard they found the body."

Grandma, slumped in her wheelchair, mumbled something about a good day-did you have a good day?-and Carl patted her on the shoulder.

Grandpa said, "Yes, but we knew they would-this is just sooner than we hoped. But we've got more trouble." He took a quick turn around the living room, stopped and stooped and looked out over the couch, between the yellowed cotton curtains, to the street. "Karen Svoboda got out and made a call. The cops who were in the Duluth paper, this Davenport and the Russian Kalin, came into the bakery today and got some pastry, and then they sat in front and told Karen about finding the body, and about spy rings and murder charges, and the FBI coming in. This was no accident, that they came to the bakery."

Carl was freaked: "Man. I hope they weren't watching Karen when she called."

"She was smart," Grandpa said. "She went down to Webster's Beauty; she's got a friend who works there. She talked to the friend and then borrowed her cell phone to make the call. I don't see how they could trace that. They couldn't see her friend, couldn't see the phone, couldn't see her calling…"

"But they went another step," Carl said. "Is Spivak talking? Maybe this house is bugged…" Carl looked up at the light fixture as if a bug might be dangling there.

"I don't think it's Anton. We would have had a warning. But Marsha Spivak's a Svoboda, so maybe it was just more pressure. They can't talk to Anton because of the lawyers, but they talk to the Svobodas, figuring it will get back to the Spivaks…"

"We hope," Carl said. "So what do we do? Hide out?"

"No, no. We confuse, delay, run around." He took another quick lap of the living room, twisting his gnarled fists together. Not frightened, Carl thought: excited. "I'm thinking that we should send you out again."

Carl glanced at Grandma, but she seemed to be asleep. "Who?"

"Kalin. The Russian," Grandpa said. "If we get her, there'll be a question: Where does this come from? Is this more retribution for Oleshev? Make it seem even more as though there are two Russian groups fighting it out."

Carl said, "I can't do it tomorrow night. We're singing."

"The woman is at the Radisson Hotel in Duluth. What room, I don't know. If you were there at eleven o'clock tonight, when she would be there, and if you could figure out which room she's in…"

"I could buy a pizza at Domino's and get my old pizza hat and deliver a pizza to her."

Grandpa shook a finger at him. "That is excellent, if we can find out her room number."

"How do we do that?"

"We think. We think. We will find a way… but." Grandpa paused, then said, "I want you to tell me what you think about the whole idea. Of taking out Kalin. Can you do it? Does it make sense?"

Carl had no other ideas, and nodded. "Makes sense to me. Especially if we could be sure that they are confused. Like, we call them, you could speak Russian, maybe call the embassy, tell them to stay out. If the Russians are working with the FBI…"

"Another phone call," Grandpa said. "That could work… We need confusion, we need… something to make them go away. To look somewhere else. Something. Something."

Grandpa gave Grandma two sleeping pills, and she was gone. "She'll wake up at two o'clock in the morning and she'll be up all night, crying half the time," Grandpa said. "I think she just hurts sometimes."

"Maybe the pills screw her up," Carl said. He looked at her face; if anything, it looked more tense asleep than it did when she was awake.

"So many pills; I'm sure you're right, but who knows which ones to stop, eh? Anyway, let's work this out…"

They'd had their idea; Grandpa's eyes twinkled when he outlined it to Carl, and though Carl was doubtful, Grandpa thought it might work. "Russia is forever from these people in Duluth. What do they know about Russia? It's a million miles away, that's what."

They made the call from a shopping center telephone. They wanted a busy place, inside, but not one with loud announcements. Carl had brought an old battery-powered radio, tuned to a nonstation, so they got a noisy dead-air hiss. Grandpa dialed the number with a prepaid card, nodded when he got an answer, and Carl held the radio close to the mouthpiece. Grandpa said, with a growly, put-on Russian accent, "Hello? Hello? One moment. Radisson."

Carl took the phone. "Yes, this is Foreign Ministry calling from Moscow for a Nadya Kalin. Could you forward us to her room?"

A woman at the other end said, "Yes. Just a minute."

"Wait, wait. This is five o'clock your time, correct?"

"Yes."

"Middle of the night here," Carl said. "Is she still in five sixty-two?"

"No, no, she's on the seventh floor, but, uh, we can't give out the room number on the telephone."

"What? I'm in Moscow, what…"

"I'm sorry, but you can get that number from Ms. Kalin. I'll put you through…"

The operator disappeared from the line, and a moment later, the phone started ringing and Carl hung up. "Shit."

"What?" Grandpa asked.

"Got the floor, but she wouldn't give out the room number. She's on the seventh floor."

Grandpa thought for a moment, then said, "We've got to go to Duluth."

"You're coming? What about Grandma?"

"She's asleep. We'll be back before she wakes."

The drive to Duluth took forever. Grandpa had another plan for finding the room, but it would only work if Kalin were out. "We should try to get there when she would be eating," Grandpa said. But when Carl drove over the speed limit, Grandpa would say, "Slow, slow, we can't afford a ticket. Look at the clock, remember the miles-we will be all right with steady progress. Calculate. Always calculate."

They finally came over the top of the hill, headed into downtown, saw the Radisson ahead, pulled into the hotel parking lot.

"We could find a public phone, so we wouldn't have to use your cell phone," Carl said.

"I think one call with a cell phone, into the switchboard…"

"But it's the small things that kill us," Carl said. "Let me go inside and look around."

"Quickly," Grandpa said, with a small smile. Carl was thinking.

Carl went inside, had a piece of luck: the check-in desk was just inside the door, and he walked on past, as though he had a room, and found the elevators. The elevators were in the central tower, so most of the area around the elevators and stairs was not visible from the desk. And there was only one person at the desk, and apparently another person in a side room…

And he found a pay phone, off the lobby, out of sight from the desk. He turned and went back out. "C'mon," he said.

"What?"

"I got a phone."

He took Grandpa through, the old man putting on a hobble as they walked into the lobby. They ignored the girl behind the desk, who ignored them back, and he left Grandpa with the phone. "One minute exactly," Carl said. "You've got change?"

Grandpa fumbled in his pocket, took out some quarters and dimes. "Go," he said.

Carl took the elevator to the seventh floor. Another piece of luck: not as many rooms as he'd feared. The floor was circular, curving away from him, nobody in sight. He waited, looking at his watch. One minute. The phone should be ringing…

Then he heard it. He followed the sound, four rooms down. Room 745. He paused outside the room, making sure. When he was sure, he walked the rest of the way around the tower, and found nothing but silence. He came back around to 745, and the phone was still ringing. Good.

He pushed the elevator button, the door popped open, and he rode back to the lobby, walked around to the pay phone. He nodded at Grandpa, who hung up. "Yes?"

"Yes," Carl said. He took a ballpoint out of his pocket and wrote 745 on the palm of his hand.

Before they left, he tried to imagine exactly where Kalin's room was. It had been to the right out of the elevator, not the last room… hard to figure in a round hotel.

"Wait one more minute," he said to Grandpa. "I want to look at the stairs."

"Hurry," Grandpa muttered.

Carl had to know where the stairs went, where they came out-and after scouting them, stopped at the third floor, 345, and walked off the distance between the room and the elevator. Back in the lobby, he held up a finger to Grandpa, then he walked it off, so he knew about where Kalin's room would be overhead. He marked the position in his mind, went outside, and counted up the building. Third room from the center line, he thought. Maybe fourth. Not second…

But maybe he was wasting his time. The hotel seemed nearly empty, and maybe any light on the seventh floor meant that Kalin was home…

Time to kill. They drove up the hill, spotted the Domino's just to make sure it was still there, and open, continued to the Miller Hill Mall, spent a half hour walking around the bookstore. Grandpa took a leak, they each bought a danish, and Carl found an outdoor-sports section and browsed the books on guns. Grandpa disappeared into politics.

The hours dragged. At nine o'clock, they couldn't stand it any more. Grandpa had argued that they should wait until after ten, but when Carl looked up and counted, there were lights on the seventh floor, three past the center line. "She's there," Carl said.

"You're sure?"

"Just about."

"Then…"

"Rock and fuckin' roll," Carl said.

They went out to the Domino's, waited for the pie. "Get a stinky one," Grandpa said. "Psychologically, you want her to smell it-it means you're real."

Looking out the window of the pizza joint, Carl wished he had a different car. Basically, a cooler car. An SVT Mustang Cobra would be about right; black, so it could run at night without being seen. With tinted windows, so he couldn't be seen. A secret box under the floorboards, right under his knees, where he could pop the gun out if a cop stopped him at a crucial point. Bap. Cop goes down, and he's on his way… And you wouldn't want Grandpa there; can't be cool with the old man hunched in the corner, peering out over the windowsill.

He got the pizza, olives, onions, and pepperoni, and they each ate a slice on the way back to the hotel, found a parking spot two blocks away, across a welter of streets, not far from a corner. "If it goes smooth, then I just walk back. If there's a problem, it'll be easier to lose them on foot," Carl explained. "You've got your radio, I've got mine, I can hide, you can come and get me."

"I've got the map…"

Carl walked around to the back of the car: right. Like he's got this black Mustang, 4.6 liter V8 punching out 390 horsepower, and he's cool, but this cop has got to pull him over, see, and the thing is, something's going on and he can't be late so he pops the cop. But don't the cops call in your license tags when they stop you? It seems like they did on Cops…

He was caught up in the fantasy, but came out of it when he had to struggle with the hatch lid. He had a piece-of-shit Taurus with about as much cool as a fuckin' baby buggy. He got the gun out of a storage bin, checked the magazine, reseated it, went back to the passenger side. Grandpa handed him a pair of light gloves, and said, "I wiped the box, it should be clean."

"Back in a minute," Carl said.

"Wait, wait." Grandpa fished under the seat, took out a single blaze-orange glove, the kind that hunters wore during deer season. "You must remember-whatever else, you must drop this in the room, you must drop it. This is part of the confusion, part of the plan. Drop the glove."

New girl behind the desk. She was reading something, and when Carl sensed that she was about to look up, he looked away from her. He pushed the elevator button, but then walked up the seven floors, carrying the pizza, to make sure the stairs were clear.

On seven, he poked his head out into the corridor. Empty. He took his old pizza delivery hat out of his pocket, walked down the corridor, the pizza balanced on top of the gun, which he held horizontally. Knocked on the door. "Pizza."

Nothing. Shit, the lights were on. He knocked again. "Pizza."

Then a thump, and his heart sped up just a step. Somebody coming. An eye at the eyehole, blue. He stepped back a bit, to let the woman get a look at him, the flat box and the hat.

The door opened. No woman. A guy, a big guy, a great big fuckin' guy with short hair, barefoot, slacks, and a T-shirt, and then, an instant later, behind him, the woman, saying, "I didn't order a pizza…"

And the guy saw the gun, or at least the barrel of it. His eyes widened, and Carl-what the heck-shot him in the heart. The guy looked surprised, and then went down like a ton of bricks and the woman screamed and ran back into another room.

The Imperfect Weapon thought with a tiny splinter of his mind, Might have known there was another room, and went after her-strode after her, tall, movie-killer-like-it was all over but the shooting, bitch. He heard a latching sound-sounded like a gun?-and he did a quick peek at the doorway and saw her kneeling behind the bed, fumbling with something, and he brought the gun up.

And she started to turn and he saw the gun in her hand and thought Whoa, and the gun seemed to explode in her hand and the doorway next to his head splintered and Carl got off a shot and the woman fired again, ten feet away, hit the door, and then another shot punched through the drywall next to his head and Carl poked the gun around the door and fired twice, quickly, and heard what sounded like a piece of china exploding. He remembered the pink lamp on the nightstand where she got the gun, thought he must have hit it; another shot hit the door and Carl said, "Fuck it," and ran.

And as he ran, he dropped the orange glove Grandpa had given him. He'd forgotten about it until that minute, had held it under the pizza box, but now he'd changed his grip on the box and he saw the glove fall and thought, "Yes," and hurtling the body in front of the door, ran down the corridor, into the stairwell and down the stairs.

He was two flights down when he heard somebody, a man, shout, "Hey, hey…" but he kept going, averting his face from the front desk as he hurried by, and was outside before he realized he still had the pizza. He headed for the car-walking fast, trying not to catch anybody's eye, two minutes, no more-and a hundred yards out, realized he was being chased: glancing back, saw a guy in a sport coat coming fast, and the guy was running with one hand held out to his side, like there was something in it. Like a gun.

Carl ran.

Still had the pizza, though.