Hit List - Lawrence Block [116]
“I think she’s bringing him in the building.”
“I knew that when the cab drove off, Keller. Although for a minute there I thought they were going to do it in the middle of the street. No, don’t say anything. Just listen for a minute. There!”
“What?”
“They’re on the elevator. Noisy contraption, isn’t it? Slow, too. Now it stopped, they must be at her place. Did you get a good look at his face, Keller?”
“Not really.”
“Neither did I, and by now she’s probably sitting on it. Use the binoculars. Do you see either of our friends out there? The mustache or the windbreaker?”
“No.”
“See a cigarette in the usual window?”
“No.”
“The guy she was with. Could it be one of our two guys?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so. She left earlier, she walked to the corner and caught a cab, and haven’t we seen both of our guys since then?”
“We saw Mustache. Did we see Windbreaker? I can’t remember.”
“You think one of them figured out where she was going and hooked up with her there and got to go home with her?”
“The hard part would be figuring out where she was going. Nobody tagged her to the corner, and she got a cab right away. I don’t see how she could have been followed.”
“It’s probably just some guy she picked up.”
“Met him at a party and dragged him home. That’s how you wound up with her, isn’t it?”
“It was a gallery opening.”
“Trees,” she said. “It all comes back to me. Maybe he’s Mr. Goodbar, maybe she picked him up and he’s a homicidal drifter and he’s gonna kill her.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Tell me it couldn’t happen, Keller.”
“It could,” he said, “but don’t count on it.”
“No, but if it did . . . He just lit a cigarette.”
“How on earth . . . oh, across the street.”
“Who did you think I meant?”
“The homicidal drifter upstairs. But if that’s Mustache puffing his way toward emphysema, then it couldn’t have been him in the cab with her.”
“Good thinking, Keller.”
“But it could still be Windbreaker. I wish we could see him.”
“The only reason we can see Mustache is he smokes. And we’re only guessing that’s him. He could have rigged up a night-light on a timer.”
“Just to fool us.”
“Right. Keller, nobody’s about to arrange an accident for her as long as she’s got company up there. By the time Mustache finishes his cigarette he’s going to come to the same conclusion. He’ll go to sleep, and I bet Windbreaker’s been asleep for hours already. Why don’t you go back to bed?”
“I don’t think so. You go if you want to.”
“I’m not tired. I should be but I’m not. You hungry?”
“No.”
“Because there’s some of that pizza left.”
“I’m not hungry.”
He stayed where he was and thought about the dream he’d been having. He rarely remembered dreams, but he’d been in the middle of this one when she woke him up, and it was still vivid for him. He’d bought someone’s stamp collection, picked it up cheap, and he kept finding things in it, valuable and desirable stamps he hadn’t known it contained. He drew out prize after prize, remounting his finds in his own albums, and he’d already taken out stamps worth ten or twenty times what he’d paid for the whole collection, and still there were more wonders to be found, and . . .
“Keller!”
“That was really strange,” he said. “I was remembering my dream, and all of a sudden I was back in it again.”
“Well, are you awake now? Because that’s the elevator.”
“Going up or down?”
“That’s all they do, they go up and down. I can’t tell which, all I can tell is it’s running. But since it was last on the top floor—“
“You think he’s leaving. But it could be somebody who rang for it downstairs, and in a minute we’ll hear it heading back up again.”
“It’s almost four in the morning, Keller.”
“So?”
“So it’s late for somebody to be getting home.”
“Or to be going out,” he said. “These people are artists, Dot. They don’t punch a time clock. They—“
She silenced him with a hand on his arm, pointed out the window. A man in a leather jacket emerged from the building and walked to the curb. It was the same man they’d seen a couple of hours ago,