Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [63]
Then the doorbell rang.
I turned around. Susan was standing in the doorway to the kitchen.
“Are you expecting someone?” I asked.
“Not at this hour,” she said, frowning.
She swept past me and opened the peephole. “Who is it?” she demanded. By that time I was standing beside the door with my back against the wall.
“Susan Andrews? Agent Hackbart, FBI. Please, this will only take a moment.”
Susan glanced at me angrily. All I could do was shrug my shoulders.
“FBI?” Susan said. “What is it you want?”
“Please, Miss Andrews. It won’t take long.”
She glanced again at me. “I’ve got company,” she said to the door. “Come back tomorrow.”
I gave her the thumbs-up, but the hand it was attached to was trembling again.
The voice on the other side of the door sounded very solemn and full of foreboding. “We’re not going away, Miss Andrews. We’ll stay here all night if we have to. Let us in and we’ll be gone in twenty minutes.”
“Tell him to hold on,” I whispered.
Susan leaned closer. “What are you going to do?”
“Hide the gun. Tell them to wait.”
I ran back into the bedroom and stuffed the gun under one of the pillows on the bed. Then I came back into the living room, sat myself down on the sofa, crossed my legs, and tried to look like Cary Grant, as Cal had once suggested. We were six stories up, and I couldn’t fly. The only thing I could do was look nonchalant and hope that they didn’t recognize me. It was impossible to say what the odds of that were. I nodded at Susan, and she opened the door. My heart was doing its best to nail my back to the sofa.
The door swung in as Susan stepped back, and I was looking at three men in three dark suits. Three pairs of eyes found me at the same moment, froze for an instant, then fanned the room before returning to me. I sensed confusion and even disappointment, but there was no recognition in the way they looked at me. Even so, it was a moment before they took their eyes from mine, and all the while I sat there with my leg crossed over my knee with my arm extended along the back of the couch. I waited until they holstered their guns before I moved, and then it was only to sit forward with both feet on the floor.
“What’s this about?” Susan asked. “Don’t you know what time it is?”
Two of them were rookies, both in their late twenties. One was black, and one was white, but the academy at Quantico had somehow made them into twins. I wasn’t worried about either of them, but the older man in the middle was something else. He was about fifty, the shortest of the three, and the first thing you would think when you saw him was that he was a cop.
He had the permanent tan and seared-looking skin of a sailor in the tropics, or maybe of a tennis nut who plays long sets in the middle of the day. His brown hair was fading to gray, and he had a slight stoop, as though he’d spent a lifetime looking under things. It was his eyes, however, that gave him away, and he knew how to use them. He was using them on me now, gauging my reaction to his scrutiny. I had seen a lot of eyes like that when I was on the force in New York, especially among the homicide detectives. They were the kind of eyes that would remember you.
“I’m sorry, Miss Andrews,” he said, “but this is important.”
“In that case let me see some ID, gentlemen.”
Hackbart glanced at me, but nothing in his eyes registered recognition. I met his gaze and held it, the way you do when you’ve got nothing to hide. The three of them fished out their wallets, but I knew they were legit. Susan was just buying time.
Susan studied their badges. Hackbart smiled at me. It was the phoniest smile I had ever seen. “I see you have a guest after all,” Hackbart said.
I stood up as they approached me, and I shook hands with all of them. It was clear that they didn’t know quite what to make of me. Hackbart was still doing his staring routine, trying to see if I had any reason to be nervous. I smiled back at him.
“Are