Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [85]
“I don’t have a clue. What difference does it make?”
She looked at me over one shoulder. “How could I pack intelligently if I do not know how long we will be gone?”
“I can pack my own—” I started to say. Her depth-charge eyes stopped me cold, and I realized what she was really saying.
“Do you like it?” Gem asked me on Monday.
I looked at the inch-and-a-half color photo she was holding in her palm. Gem, staring straight ahead, the barest hint of a smile on her face. “It’s okay,” I told her. “Not exactly a glamour shot.”
“But it looks like me, does it not?”
“Sure.”
“Good,” she said. And disappeared.
“Chantha Askew?”
“Of course,” she said, holding the passport with her picture and that name open so I could see it clearly. “Chantha is a good Cambodian name. And Askew, that is yours. Or the one on your passport, yes?”
“Yeah. But—”
“You don’t want to drive to Albuquerque,” she said. “Or you wouldn’t have asked me about flights, much less to book one. There is some risk in flying. It’s not as … anonymous. You have not ever used your own passport before, have you?”
“No,” I told her, wondering even as I spoke how she could know that.
“And you have no fear of the people who constructed it for you revealing—?”
“No!” I cut her off sharp. “Not a chance.”
“All right,” she said, so softly that I realized I must have shown something in my face. Wolfe sell me out? She’d die first. And I’d rather be dead than to ever know about it if she did.
Gem was quiet for a minute. Then she gently pushed at me until I sat down, and followed me down until she was in my lap.
“They don’t have your name, the one on your passport,” she said softly, not having to spell out who “they” were. “And they don’t have your face, either. They don’t know who you are. Or where you are. You are hunting them; not they, you. But that doesn’t mean they don’t know you.…”
“What are you trying to say?”
“They wanted to kill you because they knew you. We do not know why. Assassins kill when they are paid. But those who hire assassins, it is always for one of two reasons: it is either what you did, or what you are. What you described, it was too intricate for simple revenge. Too expensive. And it has become very, very complicated. So it must be that whoever wants you dead also fears you.”
“Look, Gem, all this … logic of yours is fine, but—”
“Indulge me, please. Assume they know you. Or know about you, anyway. They do not know where you are. Or even if you are alive. But one thing I am certain they would not expect—that you would be married.”
“Huh?”
“Oh, I do not mean you could not marry. Have you ever—?”
“No.”
“Yes. All right. What I meant was, you would not be … traveling as a married man. With a wife, see?”
“So you’re coming along as cover?”
“I am coming along because I am your woman.”
“You keep saying that.”
“That?”
“That you’re my woman.”
“I am.”
“My ‘woman’ … What does that mean in Cambodian, my boss?”
“Don’t be silly!” She giggled. “I am very obedient.”
“So long as—?”
“So long as the orders are sensible,” she said, climbing off my lap.
Gem sat quietly next to me in the back seat of Flacco’s Impala on the way back up to Portland. Maybe being a married woman required more decorum.
“I am going to build one for myself, very soon,” Gordo said to me. I figured Flacco had heard this a few hundred times.
“Which way are you looking to go?”
“Like this one,” he said, patting the Impala’s padded dash. “But not no Chevy, that’s for sure.”
“Because …?”
“I need my ride to be … I don’t know, man … like no other one on the road. But I want to stay with the factory look,” he said, with a nod in Flacco’s direction. “That’s what’s happening now.”
“Me, I like the fifties better than the sixties for that,” I told him.
“Fifties? I don’t know, man. The sixties, the shapes were … wilder, you know?”
“Maybe. Maybe too wild. If I was doing it, I’d want something people’d have to look twice at just to figure out what it was.”
“Hey, hombre,” Flacco threw in, “there’s no way to do that when they made millions of each model then.