8
The doctor put a pressure bandage on my, ah, thigh, and gave me some pills for the pain. “You’ll walk funny for a few days,” he said. “After that you should be fine. Though you’ll have an extra dimple in your cheeks now.”
“I’m glad there’s socialized medicine,” I said. “If only there was a vow of silence that went with it.”
Downes showed up as the doctor was leaving. And he and I explained my situation to the gray cop and the young one. Two guys came with body bags and before they took away the bodies we looked at them. I got out my Identikit pictures and both of them were in the pictures. Neither one was out of his twenties. Or ever would be. Downes looked at the Identikit picture and the fallen kid, and nodded. “How much you get for him?”
“Twenty-five hundred dollars.”
“What will that buy in your country?”
“Half a car.”
“Luxury car?”
“No. ” Downes looked at the kid again. He had long blond hair and his fingernails were very recently clipped and clean. His still hands looked very vulnerable. “Half an inexpensive car,” Downes said.
“He ambushed me,” I said. “I didn’t lay in wait for either of them.”
“You say.”
“Oh come on, Downes. Is this the way I’d do it?”
Downes shrugged. He was looking at the traces of talcum powder still in front of the door. White partial footprints were now all over the room. “You powdered the room before you left,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“If one of them hadn’t?”
“I’d have opened the door very slowly and carefully and checked the floor inside before I went in,” I said.
“And you waited them out. Shoved the door open and stood in the corridor until they made their move.”
“Yeah.”
“Well now, you’re intrepid enough, aren’t you.”
“The very word for it,” I said.
“The problem is,” Downes said, “we can’t have you running around London shooting down suspected anarchists at random and collecting the bounty.”
“That’s not my plan, Downes. I don’t shoot people I don’t have to shoot. I’m here doing a job that needs to be done, that you people are too busy to do. These two clowns tried to kill me, remember. I didn’t shoot them because they were suspected anarchists. I shot them to keep them from shooting me.”
“Why did you powder the floor when you left?”
“Can’t be too careful in a foreign land,” I said.
“And the ad you placed in the Times?”
I shrugged. “I had to get their attention.”
“Apparently you succeeded.” A uniformed cop came in with my bag of disguises and handed it to Downes. “Found this down the corridor, sir, round the corner.”
“That’s mine,” I said. “I left it there when I discovered the assassins.”
“Assassins, is it,” Downes said. He reached in the bag and took out my wig and mustache and make-up cement. His broad placid face brightened. He smiled a large smile that pushed his cheeks up and made his eyes almost close. He held the mustache under his nose. “How do I look, Grimes?” he said to the bobby.
“Like a ruddy guardsman, sir.”
“My ass is hurting,” I said. “And I don’t think it’s the wound. ”
“Why a disguise, Spenser? Did they know who you were?”
“I think one of them spotted me yesterday.”
“And you arranged a meeting?” I didn’t want Downes at the meeting. I was afraid he’d scare off my quarry and I needed to make another contact.
“No, they just left a letter in my mailbox and when they saw me take it and read it they knew who I was. There’s no meeting yet. The letter said they’d be in touch. I think it was a setup. So I thought I’d change my appearance a bit.”
Downes looked at me silently for maybe a minute. “Well,” he said, “certainly there will be little grieving for these two. I do hope you’ll keep in touch with us as things develop. And I do hope that you do not plan to bring all of these people to justice this way.”
“Not if I have a choice,” I said. The technicians zipped up the second body bag and trundled it out on a dolly.
“Half an inexpensive car,” Downes said.
“What kind of gun did the guy in here have? The one that shot me?”
The cop in the light raincoat said, “Same as the one in the hall, Colt twenty-two target pistol. They probably stole a crate of them somewhere. You’re lucky they didn’t steal a forty-five caliber, or a Magnum.”
“Might have taken a good deal more of your butt than it did,” Downes said.
“Thigh,” I said.
“Upper thigh wound.” Downes shrugged. “I’d lock my door if I were you, and be quite alert, all right?”
I nodded.
Downes and the other two were all that were left in the room now. “Keep in touch, won’t you?” Downes said.
I nodded again.
Downes gestured at the door with his head and the three of them got up and left.
I closed the door behind them and slid the bolt. The doctor had given me some pills for the pain if it got bad. I didn’t want to take them yet. I needed to think. I sat on the bed and changed my mind quickly. Lying was a better idea. Lying on my stomach was the best idea of all. Shot in the ass. Susan would doubtless find that funny. Only hurts when I laugh.
This was not a dumb group. They had me thinking about tomorrow and while I was thinking about tomorrow they would ace me tonight. Not bad. But now what. Would they show up tomorrow? Yes. They would be there looking to see if I were there looking to see if they were there. I couldn’t know that tonight’s trouble was them. They didn’t know I had Identikit drawings. Even if I did, I wouldn’t know-hell, I didn’t know-that the people who wanted to see me were the same ones who tried to blow me away tonight. Maybe there really was an informant. Maybe tonight’s people were trying to stop me from getting to the informant. I’d have to go tomorrow.
I left a wake-up call for seven-thirty, took two painkillers, and in a little while I went to sleep on my stomach. It was a pill and pain sleep, fitful, and full of brief awakenings. Killing two kids didn’t help any. I was up before the wake-up call, relieved at the dawn, feeling like I’d backed into a stove. I had slept in my clothes and my pants were stiff with dried blood when I took them off: I showered and did my best to keep the bandage dry.
I brushed my teeth and shaved and put on clean clothes. Gray slacks, blue-and-white-striped shirt with a button-down collar, blue knit tie, black-tasseled loafers, shoulder holster with gun. Continuity in the midst of change. I pasted on my fake mustache, adjusted my wig, put on a pair of pink-tinted aviator glasses and slid into my blue blazer with the brass buttons and the full tattersall lining. You can trust a guy with a tattersall lining. I checked the mirror. The roll in my collar wasn’t quite right. I loosened the tie and redid it not quite as tight.
I stepped back for a look in the full-length mirror. I looked like the bouncer in a gay bar. But it might do. I looked a lot different than I had yesterday in sweat pants and track shoes in the lobby. I put six more bullets in my inside coat pocket and I was ready. I powdered the floor again, and went to the hotel coffee shop. I hadn’t eaten since the steak and kidney pudding and it was past time. I ate three eggs sunny side up and ham and coffee and toast. It was eight-ten when I got through. In front of the hotel I got a cab and rode up to the zoo in comfort.
Leaning a little to the right as I sat.