Eight Ball Boogie - Declan Burke [57]
Dutchie’s car was parked on the third level, a tidy Fiat Bravo that could turn it up on the open road if it had to. I skulked behind a pillar and watched it for a while. Then I went back downstairs and hid out in the back of a stand-up coffee bar, gagging on a cup of coffee so bitter the ulcer gave it a standing ovation. I stocked up on a couple of bottles of Maalox in the chemist, chucked a box of painkillers in on the sale, ducked into the public toilet. When the ulcer stopped screaming I went back upstairs.
There was no one around that I recognised from the first trip. I threaded my way through the parked cars, flipped open the petrol cap guard, hooked the keys, got in. The retrieval ticket was in the glove compartment, with ‘Nothing yet’ scrawled on the back. I wasn’t surprised. Dutchie was good and he knew a lot of people, but the kind of people Dutchie knew usually didn’t surface in the a.m.
The .38 was in the glove compartment too. That did surprise me. Dutchie wasn’t known for his sense of humour.
I drove out of the shopping centre, turned west on Fortfield, towards Herbie’s. The lights were out on Pearse Street but Midtown wasn’t any more backed up than usual, the usual heart attack of clogged arteries, the flow reduced to a stop-start trickle. Joe was directing traffic at the broken lights, waving everyone on with gusto and savagely berating anyone who ignored his directions. Which was everyone, including himself. Running his hands through his shock of white hair, lips flecked with spittle, eyes wild.
He spotted me as the car crawled through the junction. He winked, tipped a sly nod at the chaos, straightened his back and saluted. That provoked another rash of horn tooting, which only started Joe ranting again. I saluted him back and slid out onto Fortfield, grinning.
If my sanity had a shock of white hair it might have looked the way Joe did, its cogs and gears meshing, frantic, as it tried to work out the logic of walking into what was almost certainly an ambush.
There’s no substitute for gut instinct and you can’t argue a hunch with logic. My gut feeling suggested septicaemia but I also had a hunch that claimed the pros were too cute to leave themselves open to casual observation, say by staking out Herbie’s place. If the pros were as good as I thought they were, and I wasn’t going to underestimate anyone smart enough to squeeze a trigger, they wouldn’t leave themselves open to the random vagaries of fate. They’d have something a little more professional in the pipeline, something slick and tidy that would happen at a time and place I wouldn’t even dream of guessing at. My only defence was to fly below their radar, by acting even dumber than before. Which was why I was following up on the hunch about Herbie.
I cruised past the house, turned at the end of the cul-de-sac. Waited ten minutes, the car in gear, foot on the gas, in case anything moved. Nothing stirred. When I was satisfied the pros weren’t around, I parked a couple of houses down from Herbie’s. One thing I knew for sure, the pros weren’t inside. If they were they’d have answered the phone when I rang, curious as to who might be ringing the guy they’d just turned over. Because if what Katie told me about my office was true, then Herbie had been turned over too. All that remained to be seen was how thorough the pros had been.
I rang the bell and waited. I rang again, and then started to wonder why I was ringing the bell. Traffic thrummed by out on Fortfield. Nothing moved on the avenue, no sound disturbed the chirping of the sparrows pecking at the frozen ground. It was dry, too. When it came, and the