Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [31]
I wasn’t worried that anyone loyal to Dmitri was looking. I didn’t think there was anyone loyal to Dmitri still alive. If they were, they were holed up somewhere, waiting for their chance to get out of town. Or for a clear shot at Anton.
But whoever set the whole thing up, they were waiting. Or thought I was dead. And I had no way to tell which.
I shook my head, as if the movement would clear my thoughts. There were too many possibilities. And not enough data. Maybe whoever set it up did think I was dead. The shooters would have reported that I’d been hit. And that they’d put a round into my skull to make sure. An unidentified guy found dead in the Hunts Point wasteland wouldn’t have been enough to make the papers.
There would be a record, though. Homicides get investigated, even if not all equally. There’d be an attempt to identify any dead body. And if whoever tried to cap me knew anything about me, they’d know my prints would fall in five minutes.
So they had a tight time-frame, a location, and plenty of resources. And with Dmitri getting blown away, more than enough to add it up. I had to play it like a hand of five-card stud, now down to the final bet. I couldn’t see their hole card, but there were enough other gamblers at the table so that I had a pretty good count of the deck. I was betting they knew they hadn’t finished the job.
Wolfe had returned my passport. Some guy nobody recognized dropped it off at Mama’s. It was the same one I’d given her in the restaurant: the beautiful forgery she’d had made for me a while back. The new one had the same phony name. Only now the photo matched my new face.
But that didn’t mean I should be quick to use it. No matter how big the organization that had tried to kill me was, they couldn’t have been watching all the ways out of town—especially this town—for the past few months. So they couldn’t trap me at the border. But they could follow my trail … if I was dumb enough to leave paper footprints.
Clarence drove me to Philly. Only took a couple of hours, even with the sporadic snow. I shouldered my duffel bag and stepped into the terminal at Thirtieth and Market, where I grabbed an Amtrak for D.C. It was about ten minutes by cab from Union Station to the bus depot. I was on a Greyhound to Chicago by a little past midnight.
We hit Pittsburgh by morning, changed buses in Cleveland, made a rest stop somewhere in Indiana, and rolled into Chicago around three-thirty in the afternoon. Going by bus, it takes quite a while. And you have to do without a lot of features the airlines provide. Like metal detectors.
“You know this town?” The voice on the phone was cop-hard, but with an unmistakable Irish lilt.
“Been here a few times is all.”
“You’re not far from Wells Street. Just walk south—away from the lake—a couple of blocks. There’s a bookstore in the twelve-hundred block. Big one. Called Barbara’s. They’re used to all kinds of people in there. I’ll meet you outside at nine tonight. Just stand outside, to the left of the door as you come out. You smoke, right?”
“No.”
“Well, just carry a cigarette, then. Explains why you’re standing outside in this weather.”
“Okay.”
The bookstore was much bigger than a first glance would tell you. When I walked in, I saw a long narrow corridor with a counter to the right. But it spread out to my left, and just kept going. I wandered through the stacks, passing time until the meet. Walls of books. I thought about how much reading I’d done since … it happened. When I realized how close I’d come to losing my sight, I turned as indiscriminately greedy as a just-paroled prisoner in a whorehouse. I read everything I could get my hands on. Once I settled down, I kept up the reading but got more selective.
The last few months had been a lot like being back Inside. Reading, lifting weights … getting ready. And most of the time spent