Hit List - Lawrence Block [66]
She poured herself some more iced tea. “I know they shopped this around. They wouldn’t come right out and say so, but they never would have taken my terms if they hadn’t run into a few brick walls along the way.”
“It’d be nice to know just who told them no.”
“Roger, for instance.”
“For instance,” he agreed.
“Well,” she said, “I think we have to assume they ran it past him. So we’re taking the usual precautions. Nobody’s meeting you, nobody knows who you are or where you’re coming from. Even if Roger’s out there in Albuquerque, even if he’s sitting in Petrosian’s lap, he’s never going to draw a bead on you. Because all you have to do is fly out there and fly back and you get paid.”
“Half,” he said.
“Half if all you do is take a look. The other half if you make it happen. And there’s an escalator.”
“Instead of a staircase?”
“No, of course not.”
“Because what’s the difference? He’s going to lose his footing on the escalator?”
“An escalator clause, Keller. In the contract.”
“Oh.”
“Big bonus if you get him before he testifies. Smaller bonus if it’s after he starts but before he finishes.”
“While he’s on the stand?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s going to take him several days to make all the trouble he can for our guys. Say he’s on the stand one day, and that night he slips on a banana peel and falls down the escalator.”
“Or finds some other way to break his neck.”
“Whatever. We get a bonus, but not as big as if he broke it a day earlier.” She shrugged. “That was just something to negotiate, because it’s not going to happen. You’ll go out there and come back, and they can console themselves by thinking how much money they just saved. Not just half the fee, but the bonus, too.”
“Because it’s impossible,” he said. “Except it’s never completely impossible. I mean, a bomb under a manhole cover on the route to the courthouse, say. Or a strike force of commandos hitting the place where he’s cooped up.”
“Desperate men,” she said, “led by Lee Marvin, their hard-bitten colonel.”
“Or a sharpshooter on a roof. But none of those are my style.”
“You could strap some explosive around your waist and run up and give him a hug,” she said, “but I don’t suppose that’s your style, either. Don’t worry about it. Spend a week, ten days tops. Have they got stamp dealers in Albuquerque? They must.”
“I’ve done business through the mails with a fellow in Roswell,” he said.
“Roswell, New Mexico?”
“Wherever that is.”
“Well, it’s in New Mexico,” she said. “We know that much, don’t we?”
“But I don’t know if it’s near Albuquerque, and he may just deal through the mails. But sure, there’ll be stamp dealers there. There’d have to be.”
“So have fun,” she said. “Buy some stamps.”
“Or if it turns out there’s a way to do it . . .”
“So much the better,” she said, “but don’t knock yourself out. They’ll guard Petrosian like Fort Knox until he’s done testifying. Then they’ll stick him in the Witness Protection Program, and years from now somebody’ll spot him. And, if anybody still cares, you’ll get another crack at him.”
Keller’s motel was about a mile from the Arrowhead Inn on Candelaria where the feds were keeping Michael Petrosian. It might have been interesting to take a room in the Arrowhead himself, handy and risky at the same time, but he didn’t have the option. Petrosian and the men who guarded him were the motel’s only guests. The media referred to the place as an armed compound, and Keller didn’t have any quarrel with the term. He’d driven past it a few times, and had seen it over and over again on television, and that’s what it was, its parking lot filled with government cars, its doors manned by unsmiling men in suits and sunglasses. All it lacked was a watchtower and a few hundred yards of concertina wire.
Short of digging a tunnel, Keller couldn’t see any way in—or any way out once you got in. And Petrosian never left the place. His keepers brought food in, ordering it by phone and sending a couple of the suit-and-sunglasses boys to fetch it.
If you knew where they were going to order from, and if you could