The Hours of the Virgin (26 page)

That was a mistake. His arm turned right out of my grip, as if he'd gotten tired of carrying me and it was time for the referee to start counting. The hard flat smack of the pistol going off was like a heavy book hitting the floor. A hot wind slapped my ribcage. I jerked away, an involuntary reaction, like jumping when a snake strikes at the transparent glass separating you. But I wasn't through. I tore my coat away from its buttons, reached back and felt the rubber grip of the .38 in my kidney holster, snapped it out and jammed it deep into the hard roll around his middle and squeezed the trigger. The report was as muffled as if I'd stuck it into a pile of earth. The heat blew back over my hand. I smelled sulphur and saltpeter and scorched cloth and cooked meat. I got another whiff of his lunch, a curse of surprise and pain behind it. He struggled to level the pistol in his pocket; I think the barrel had gotten snarled in the hole he'd made when he fired through the lining. I didn't wait to confirm it. He was as strong as a bull and as desperate as a trapped grizzly. I fired twice more, feeling the cylinder turn both times. He stopped struggling then. A string broke inside him and he fell away from the gun. I followed him down with it, just in case it was a trick. Three bullets seemed hardly enough.

Three bullets had been plenty. He knelt almost reverently on the scuffed linoleum, clutching at his stomach with threads of smoke uncoiling between his fingers, his other hand still in his pocket but not doing anything. After a while he fell forward. His forehead hit the floor like a rock. Then he was very still, kneeling there with his buttocks pointed at the ceiling; and I remembered a ring commentator somewhere sometime saying:
When they go down on their face, they don't get back up
.

Ben Whatever. Loyal as a police dog, shot like a rabid stray. All he wanted was to make his master happy.

Phooey on him. I inspected my side. The .32's muzzle flare had burned a hole the size of my hand through my coat, scorching a black triangle onto the shirt beneath as if it had been done by an iron. There was no blood. I might have a second-degree burn. A little Neosporin would do it. A little Neosporin and a couple of months with a police therapist. I leaned over Ben, got his fingers unclamped from the pistol in his pocket, gave it a quick glance, and put it away in my coat. Beretta 81. I didn't worry about preserving the original fingerprints. Ben's hand had been all over it, and anyway latent prints evaporate in a few days or a few weeks. But North wouldn't know that.

And then I remembered that I wasn't alone with Ben, and how quiet a room containing three people shouldn't be when only one of them was supposed to be dead.

29

Only the deaf know silence.

When the soundtrack drops out of an old film you still hear the frames ratcheting through the gate of the projector. In forests deep inside the Arctic circle the wooden trunks groan as they crystallize. A hundred feet below the earth's crust in a bomb shelter with walls six feet thick, your breath roars and your heart is a dead-blow hammer; your blood whistles through your veins. True silence is as rare as roc's eggs, as piercing as a steam blast. Compared to the complete and utter cessation of sound, a boiler factory may as well be a pillow fight.

For a time as I stood over Ben's body, silence rang like a brass bell. The first real sound I was aware of was my brain cells clicking to life, tickity-tick, followed by the buzzing of electrical impulses in my nerve-ends. Then the whole system—heart, capillaries, digestive mechanism—kicked in with a thump and a shudder like a refrigerator coming back on. That was when I remembered Laurel Strangeways.

She was sitting on the floor in front of the sink, breathing in quavering gasps and gripping her right leg above the knee. Her hands and the slick material of her silver pajamas glittered with blood.

I knelt by her side quickly, fished out my pocket knife, slit the hem of the pajama leg, then grabbed it in both hands and tore it up to the thigh. I spread her hands gently for a look, but there was too much blood. I found my handkerchief and used it as a sponge. I turned the leg carefully, pulling a gasp and a little whimper out of her. I'd have yelled. The bullet had passed clean through. The blood wasn't pumping, so it hadn't nicked an artery. I tore the satin another six inches, wrapped the handkerchief around her thigh above the wounds, unclipped the Smith & Wesson from my belt, and used the four-inch barrel to twist the cloth tight, tying it off so the tourniquet would hold. I looked around. Pink Robe was standing in the kitchen doorway. There was blood on the floor amidst the cabbage and she was looking at it all and the corpse as if here was one more thing she had to clean up before business got lively.

“Call nine-one-one,” I said. “Ambulance. You know ambulance?” I spaced out the syllables.

“EMS.” She withdrew into the hallway. The door flapped shut.

Laurel was sitting with her back against the sink cabinet. She shivered. I stripped off my coat and draped it over her shoulders. “Chinee girl feely rousy?” I asked.

She made a ghost smile. “I've been shot. How do you think I feel? How bad is it?”

“It's all flesh. That's more serious than the westerns make out, but it's how I'd take a bullet if I had the choice. They won't have to do any more damage digging it out. If it had been the magnum, the leg would be gone. You'll be running for those hills in a month.”

“Do you have a cigarette?”

I got one going and held it for her while she puffed. She was hugging herself under the coat. “Strangeways said you don't smoke.”

“I think we can tell him now, don't you?”

She took a few more puffs and then she closed her eyes. I made sure she was breathing—shock can kill—then I went to work.

The first page of the Hours of the Virgin had come to rest on the floor by the stove, where some cabbage had soaked through from beneath, adding a fresh stain to the inventory. I picked it up carefully, brushed off some clinging morsels, sandwiched it between the newspaper pages lining the drawer, and laid the tray on top. I closed the drawer, then knelt again, excavated the .32 from the pocket of my overcoat, and rearranged the coat across Laurel's shoulders. She was breathing evenly. The tourniquet was holding.

Finding where the slug had gone after it passed through her leg was more difficult. It had gone into the linoleum in a corner near the baseboard. I carved it out with my pocket knife and threw it out the window.

I heard the first siren then; time to go into high gear. I rummaged among the items in the overhead cupboards until I came across an ancient box of Special K at the back. The contents were alive with weevils. I slid the pistol in among the flakes, then pushed down the flap and returned the box to its place on the top shelf.

When I turned around, Laurel was watching me. “Think you can get away with it?” Her voice was strained. The shock was wearing off; the pain was starting.

“If the cops don't get too hungry. Another drag?” I took the cigarette out of my mouth. She shook her head. I went over to Ben, leaned across him again, and slid the magnum out of its holster. Two more sirens had joined the first. “Can you stand a little noise?”

She nodded faintly. I crossed to the open window, aimed the big revolver at the sky, and hit it. I used the corner of Ben's mackinaw to wipe the butt and then to hold the barrel while I curled the fingers of his right hand around the butt. I managed to get gun and hand into his coat pocket with the muzzle poking out through the hole the .32 had made just as the first siren swooped into the little gravel lot outside.

Neither the cops nor the EMS crew would have heard the report over the sirens. One or two neighbors might bring up the subject of a late shot, but witnesses were notoriously shaky when it came to timing. The Koreans wouldn't volunteer anything. Two shot people, two fired guns. That was too neat to tamper with.

I hoped.

“The Hours!” Laurel whispered harshly, looking around.

“Stay still,” I said. “I couldn't find a better hiding place than yours in a week.”

“They won't hear it from me.” She closed her eyes again, smiling her ghostly smile.

Fists clobbered the front door.

Part Four

The Hours of the Virgin

30

I sat on a gray composition chair in front of a gray composition desk in a small bright room with a ceiling made entirely of fluorescent lights. A jumble of textbooks on the nature of citizenship and government stood on the desk between gray steel bookends. There wasn't a single personal item in the office and I suspected it was just taking up space intended for supplies.

Technically I was under arrest, but I hadn't been cuffed or printed and no one was guarding the door, which stood open six inches. I could walk out any time if I didn't mind leaving my personal possessions behind. The room belonged to a sleek brick building, not very old, in Dearborn Heights' civic center, which included the library and city offices as well as the police department. It was as quiet as only an official building can be at 3:30 in the morning. Somewhere in a corridor someone was operating a floor buffer; its pleasant soft whir wanted to put me to sleep. I was only half resisting. I'd been asked all the questions anyone could think to ask several times. I'd answered them all pretty much the same way, varying just a little here and there to give the detectives something to chew on and to avoid sounding as if I'd rehearsed the answers. The only question that remained was whether I was going to be let go or put through the rest of the system on principle.

Of course, there was a bare possibility that the cops would take it into their heads to search the massage parlor and find Earl North's .32 and the first page of the Hours of the Virgin. I tried not to think about that. The questions would come harder then, and I was running low on tricky answers. I saved my thinking for Laurel Strangeways. The EMS team had arrived ahead of the police, stuck a tube in her arm, and whisked her off to Henry Ford Hospital, the nearest facility with a wound trauma staff worthy of the name. Updates, filtered through officers keeping tabs on when or if she would be able to provide further illumination on what had happened at That Touch of Venus, had her in critical condition with a fever. The tourniquet I'd applied had saved her from bleeding to death at the risk of creating infection. The rules kept changing about whether you should release the pressure from time to time to let the impurities bleed out; I'd opted for the lesser risk.

I had no idea how long I sat alone after the last cop took the air. They'd let me keep my watch, but I didn't look at it much. I wasn't expected anywhere, and anyway watch time is not cop time. At length a sole scraped the freshly waxed tiles outside the door and a short compact Russian came in carrying a cheap vinyl zipper portfolio and sat down behind the desk. I thought Russian because he had foxlike features and Tatar eyes of the palest blue, the irises nearly indistinguishable from the whites, sloping toward his nose under hooded lids. He had short pale hair combed forward into a point on his forehead and aristocratic nostrils. He wore a black knitted tie on a white button-down oxford shirt and a stiff black suit with a petroleum sheen. I hadn't seen him before. I didn't know his name or rank and I wasn't even sure if he was a cop.

“You're from Detroit.” He placed the portfolio on the desk and rested his hands on it.

“Just barely. I live across the street from Hamtramck. My closest neighbor's Ukrainian.”

It didn't do anything for him. The late generation of citizens of Eastern European descent was the first to show no interest in ancient alliances. Then again, I could have been all wrong about his nationality.

“The police in Detroit should have explained to you that a permit to carry a concealed weapon is not a permit to shoot people.”

“I've had it for twenty years. This is only the second time I've had to kill a man. It was self-defense both times.”

“You seem pretty casual about it.”

“I've been awake for twenty hours. I could seem casual on the
Titanic.
”

“According to your own statement, this man Ben was acting out of loyalty to his employer. If you're as honorable as you want us to think you are, you might feel sorry you had to kill him.”

“I never said I was honorable. The hell with him. He'd have killed us both as soon as he found out we didn't have what he wanted. He still managed to put a bullet through Mrs. Strangeways' leg. Have you heard anything lately from the hospital?”

“She was in serious condition as of thirty minutes ago. I'm worried about that bullet. A magnum round should have smashed her leg to pieces.”

“Do a carbon test if you don't believe me.”

“Thank you. I'd never have thought of it if you didn't suggest it.” He drummed his fingers on the portfolio. It was big and bulky enough to contain a number of items, including a medium-caliber pistol and a page from an illuminated manuscript. “What gave him the impression you knew where to find this Hours of the Virgin?”

“My guess is he thought he'd looked everywhere else. I let him go on thinking what he thought. It was the best insurance I could get under the circumstances.”

He drummed some more. “Let me tell you a little something about Dearborn Heights. We're ten minutes from downtown Detroit, less when they aren't tearing up the streets. There are people who have lived here fifty years who have never been there. Twenty years under that old crook in the mayor's mansion pushed that city clear off the map. We have our problems, sure, but we don't have any police chiefs in prison and nobody's been stomped to jelly in broad daylight for being the wrong color in the wrong neighborhood. We don't need fortune-hunters bulling in from the big bad city and dumping their trash here. We don't need it, and we certainly don't appreciate it.”

“That's why you arrested me? Illegal dumping?”