Flood - Andrew H. Vachss [133]
I didn’t mention how she had helped with Goldor—what was the point?
“There’s something you can do,” I told her. “An acting job on the phone. It has to be done in a couple of hours, and we have to find a pay phone to do it from, okay?”
“Okay,” she answered, brightening a bit.
“I’ll go over it with you until you get it right—we won’t get a second chance.”
“And it will help bring him to us?”
“Look at the wall, Flood. You see it? Don’t glare at me like that—look at it. Okay, now draw a square on the wall with your mind—a white square—the whole border is made up of tiny pieces of tile, all different colors, dark shades. Okay?”
A short pause from Flood, then, “Yes, I see it.”
“We are going to make a mosaic, you and me. We’re going to keep filling in the square, working from the corners in until the whole thing is tiled over, yes?”
“Yes,” she said, concentrating.
“But no white tiles, all right? Only the last tiny little tile is white. That’s him—that’s the Cobra—and his tile doesn’t go down until all the other tiles are on the board. That’s the way it works. He sits outside the board holding his one white tile, deciding where to put it, running out of space. But our tiles keep coming down and the more he waits, the less space he has. He won’t put it down until there’s no other space.”
“Maybe he won’t put it down at all.”
“He has to put it down. He’s floating in the air above the board, Flood—he has to come down—the board is his whole world. There’s no other place for him to go.”
“If we just work from the corners in . . . if we work according to a set pattern, well . . . won’t he know what we’re doing?”
“Not for a while. And when he does see it, when he sees the walls coming in on him, he may put his tile down fast, make his move while he still thinks he has some choices left.”
Flood looked at the wall, speaking in a faraway voice. “Yes . . . and if he puts his tile down while he still has some room . . . that’s what you meant about him coming here?”
“Yes, baby,” I said quietly.
“I understand. And the phone call you want me to make . . . ?”
“Another couple of tiles on the board.”
“Let’s do it, Burke,” she said, turning to me with a chilling smile on her beautiful face—and we started the rehearsals together.
47
IT WAS ALMOST four-thirty in the morning by the time Flood and I finished our work. We left her place after the rehearsal and went to my office, let Pansy out on the roof, and gathered up some equipment. Then back into the Plymouth and over to the warehouse. I took Flood’s hand and led her to the back, where I plugged in the phone set. I wasn’t so much worried about a trace on the call, but we needed a private space to work and I didn’t want some nosy citizen blundering into a pay phone at that hour. Or a cop.
I made the connections and switched on the microcassette to check the twin speakers for feedback. The setup worked perfectly, sounds of a nightclub at closing time filled the little room—glasses clinking, loud stupid-drunk voices, tinny disco music, a wall of noise. I played with the volume and equalizer controls until it sounded just right, slipped the encoder disc into the mouthpiece of the field phone, and punched in the number, handing the instrument to Flood.
We heard the phone being picked up on the third ring. “FBI. Special Agent Haskell speaking. May I help you?”
And Flood’s voice came on, sounding cigarette-raspy and scared at the same time. “Is this the FBI?”
“Yes, ma’am, how can we help you?”
“I work at Fantasia, you know, in Times Square?”
“Yes, ma’am. And your name is?”
“My name is . . . no—wait! Just listen, okay? I’m not going to tell you that. There’s a guy that was in here tonight. He was drinking, but not too much, right? But he was fucked up, you know? His eyes were crazy—not like they usually get here when they see the girls, real crazy. And he was talking to himself. People would sit down near