Killing Castro - Lawrence Block [6]
The Cuban led them to the door. False dawn was streaking the sky. Hines looked at the watch on his wrist, saw that it was almost five in the morning. They had been up the whole night, then. When was the last time he’d been up that long? At school, of course. At Cornell, cramming for exams, working like a Turk for finals.
It seemed like a million years ago. Christ, he was a college kid, he was supposed to be at school studying for tests and going to proms and laying coeds in the back seats of cars and otherwise engaging in the hysterical procedure of getting an education. He was a kid, a punk, a wet-behind-the-ears kid all of nineteen years old, a scared little kid with nothing on the ball, and now he was supposed to go into a foreign country and kill a man named Fidel Castro.
Who the hell was he? A college kid. A kid whose father had sold insurance and whose mother lived on it now, an upstate-New-York-appleknocker kind of kid, a kid who’d never had a gun in his hand in his life. Kids in Utica didn’t play with guns. The town was a cultural backwater; teenage gangs weren’t the rage, and you could grow up slowly and leisurely, accepting middle-class values because that was simply the way things were, hoping to grow up and marry a girl right off the Saturday Evening Post’s prettiest cover, raise a few children and make a comfortable living.
So Utica was bad training ground for an assassin.
And so was Cornell, for God’s sake. Jesus, Castro was some damned kind of a folding bed, not a man you were going to kill.
When you stopped to think about it, it was kind of nuts.
Nuts, ridiculous, crazy, wet-brained. It didn’t make any sense at all. There were four others, and one of them was a brainless hunk of muscle and another was a rugged outdoor type and another was a little old guy who reminded Hines of his father who had died several years ago of coronary thrombosis and who had peddled insurance in Utica. And the fourth one, this Turner character next to him, the strong silent type who was made out of wrought iron. A hell of an odd bunch, a crazy bunch, and the bunch was made much crazier by the addition of one, James Hines.
Nuts.
The Cuban had unlocked the door, had given them the key, had left them. Turner was in the kitchen making coffee. Hines sat down in the living room. He couldn’t sit still, had to get up and pace the floor. He went on pacing until Turner came back with two mugs of coffee.
“It’s instant,” Turner said. “And I couldn’t find milk or sugar. Black all right with you?”
“It’s fine.”
“Then take a cup and drink it. And sit down, for God’s sake. You make me nervous.”
He took the coffee, sat down, sipped it and burned his mouth. Turner was drinking the coffee as if it were room temperature.
“How can you drink it so hot?”
“I was a trucker for a while,” Turner said. “Long-distance hauling. When you stop on the road you want to get coffee down fast. You can’t wait for it to cool. It’s something you get used to.”
Hines nodded. Well, you ask and you find out. He waited for his coffee to cool a little, then sipped it.
Turner lit a cigarette. He stood up, sat down.
Turner said: “Drink more coffee, wait an hour. Then get the hell out of here and catch the first plane north.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re a kid,” Turner snapped. “A young idealistic kid in the wrong boat. You can get out while you’ve got a chance and go home to Mom and Dad.”
“Dad’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“The hell you’re sorry,” Hines said. “Forget it. You were saying something and you might as well finish it.”
The tone surprised both of them. Then Turner said: “You don’t know what it’s all about. You think this Castro is a dictator, so we’ll be heroes and kill him. You’re the only hero in the crowd, kid. I’m not here to play hero. I want twenty grand. I need twenty grand. I killed a man and a woman and if I stay in this country they’ll hang me for it. They’ll take me to Charleston and hang me.”
Hines thought, This man is a murderer. He’s telling me