The Autumn Dead

Chapter 17

Five minutes later, me sitting on a couch in a den filled with the sort of leather-bound classics nobody ever actually read and enough leather furniture to please the richest lawyer in the land, she threw my wallet back at me.

"Who the hell are you?" I said.

She just shook her head and went over and sat very efficiently on a broad leather ottoman. Her bottle-blond hair was almost white against the black leather of her riding suit. For the first time, her helmet gone, I could see her face, the broad, lopsided mouth, the earnest blue eyes, the freckles that somehow made her seem younger than the lines around her mouth and eyes indicated she was.

She put her head down, like an athlete who has just finished a long run, but the one time I squirmed to lift weight off one buttock and put it on the other, her head snapped up and she pointed the.45 in the approximate vicinity of my forehead.

Then she put her head back down again and it was then I sensed it, that certain but special air the insane exude. I'd experienced it once while visiting a cop friend on a psych ward, felt it in the vivid stares that followed me with both fear and ferocity, in the curious inexplicable smiles some odd gesture would suddenly evoke. You feel sorry for them but they scare you, too-like a sick dog you come upon, wanting to help him, but fearful he might be rabid.

She raised her head and said, "He killed Sonny. He was one of them, anyway."

"What?"

She spoke with the kind of fragile gentleness you associate with poor but honorable spinsters. "Isn't my English clear, Mr. Dwyer?"

"What I guess you said is, 'He killed Sonny.'

"That is in fact what I said, Mr. Dwyer."

"Well, I've got a couple of questions about that."

"Which are?"

"First of all, who is the 'he' you're referring to, and second, who is Sonny?"

The blue eyes grew grave. She sat there looking old suddenly, and tender too, and something like a chill worked down my back, and I felt afraid of her. It wasn't the gun, it was her simple flat connection to some truth I did not understand, the ageless mad truth of the fanatic.

"You know who 'he' is, Mr. Dwyer, and you certainly know who Sonny is. That's why you want the suitcase. So you can sell it to the men who killed him."

Then she very carefully got up and, even sensing what she was going to do, all I could do was sit and watch, fascinated as much as frightened.

She got me just once, but it was a good clean hit with the butt of the.45 right on the edge of my jaw. The headache, which had waned, came back instantly. It was now joined by something very much like a toothache.

I started to move, my male arrogance instinctively believing that I could simply grab her fragile wrist and throw her to the floor, but she had other ideas.

She put the cold, oil-smelling weapon right to my temple and said, "I'm going to make you a deal, Mr. Dwyer."

"What deal?" I wanted to sound hard, even harsh, giving her the impression that even though I had a mouth full of blood and the world's biggest ice-cream headache, I was still in charge here. I was a man, and dammit, men were always in charge of women, right? Even women with guns. Right?

"I won't kill your girlfriend if you get the suitcase and bring it to me at ten o'clock tomorrow night. I'll phone you where I want you to bring it. Do you understand me?"

I started to snarl something about what I'd do if she so much as looked at Donna again, but for the second time that night, the tall, slender woman in the black motorcycle leathers caught me fast and cracking sharp across the back of the head.

This time I fell into the darkness with something like relief. My head was starting to ache intolerably and I was tired and confused and at least a little bit afraid of what I saw in her blue eyes, the same thing I'd seen one night ten years earlier when a young mother had put an ice pick through the eyes of her infant and then waited patiently for the policeman she'd summoned. I had been that policeman.