Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [44]
It’s hard to tell if a hotel room’s been tossed. Some maids pick up every scrap, straighten every edge, put things away for you. Some don’t. The usual tricks—a hair pasted across an opening, a paper match wedged between two abutting layers of clothing—are a waste of time in hotels. But the safe … that will usually tell you if someone with access has been poking around. I carry what I need every time I go out—cash, passport, ID, tools—so if things go bad I never have to return to the room. Losing the gun would be no tragedy. It doesn’t trace to me, my prints aren’t on it. And the cash would always get me another.
The safe’s keypad was untouched.
I was kicking back in the room’s easy chair when the tap came at the door.
Clancy.
He walked in, pulled a chair away from the desk, carried it over to where I’d been sitting.
“How old do you think she is?” he asked me, as soon as I sat back down.
“She?”
“Marushka.”
“Thirty-five, forty?”
“She’s twenty-seven.”
“Okay.”
“Twenty-seven and frightened. Fear’ll age you quicker than booze.”
“But not overnight.”
“No. Not overnight.”
“So she was just a kid when she first came here.…”
“Yeah. She sends money home. There’s no jobs, she says. So she’s supporting her whole family.”
“Not so bad. She lives in a beautiful house, has a nice car all her own, plenty of time on her hands.…”
“Plenty of time to think, too. She gets deported, her whole family goes down.”
“Why should she get deported?”
“She’s sponsored. The people who own that house, all they need to do is withdraw.”
“She’d still have options.”
“What options? She’s got no special skills. No way she’d get an exemption.”
“You think the people who brought her here are threatening her?”
“No. I don’t think she has any contact with them.”
“She forwards their mail.…”
“I think that’s right. Almost has to be. But there’s no communication coming the other way. Her phone records—no long-distance calls, in or out. She’s got a cellular, too. Those are the best. For us, I mean. So long as the target uses his phone, you can find out where he’s using it from. I don’t mean the exact location, like Lojack or anything, but which city for sure. And sometimes right down to a tight grid. Anyway, her cellular, every call’s been made from the local area.”
“Did the people who own the place have cellulars?”
“They did. But they terminated service more than two years ago.”
“So that thread has snapped.”
“Yeah …” he said, dragging the word out. “Burke?”
“What?”
“She’s not in this.”
“Who?”
“Marushka.”
“I understand.”
He stood up. I packed my stuff while he waited. If he noticed the plastic-wrapped package I stowed in my duffel, he gave no sign.
Clancy dropped me off at the bus terminal on Harrison. I reached over to shake his hand.
“Thanks. For everything.”
“It was for Wolfe,” he said, keeping everything clear. “Besides, I figure, you get lucky, we may find the kid yet.”
“I know,” I told him, pulling a thick manila envelope from my coat pocket. I handed it to him.
His face flushed and his eyes went alligator on me. “I told you—”
“It’s for Licensed for Life,” I said.
He took a deep breath. Let it out his nose, slowly.
“I need a receipt,” I told him. “You’re a 501(c)(3), right? This is a charitable contribution.”
“You file with IRS?”
“Wayne Askew does.”
He reached into the back seat of his Nissan, found the right box, extracted a pad of receipts.
“Make it out for twenty-five hundred,” I said.
“That’s too—”
“There’s twenty large in that envelope,” I cut him off. “But Wayne Askew doesn’t earn the kind of money that he could donate that big to charity, so …”
“Christ!”
“It’s good to have something to believe in,” I said.
I took my receipt and got out. Clancy hauled my duffel out of the trunk.