The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [94]
Nevertheless, he was feeling good. As they’d crept from spot to spot at the airport, and the plan had been rehearsed, he couldn’t repress the hope that he and Nancy might turn the tables after the Niemiecs had been dealt with and get away with enough dope to finance them forever. There was some irony worked into it, too—it was Mel’s trap, after all, with the dope as the cheese, except that he and the Niemiecs both would end up as the losers . . . somehow. And with Canada so close, Ellis had no trouble imagining it as the stepping-off place to an island beach far away, where he envisioned them taking in the sun and catching up on the good life.
His mother, as if infected by his mood, sounded sharper and more upbeat than recently, when the lethality of her disease had been visibly marking its progress.
“Ellis, I don’t know what I did to deserve you,” she said in her weak voice, “but I want you to know how happy you make me feel.”
“No problem, Ma. How’re you doin’ today?”
“Pretty chipper. Is Nancy okay?”
“She’s good. You sleep all right last night?”
“Oh, yes. After all the excitement, I was pretty tuckered out.”
Ellis made himself more comfortable on the couch. He could never tell how long these conversations might last, they were so dependent on her energy. But she seemed to be riding high.
“Yeah? You guys win big at bingo or something?”
“No, no,” she said. “The police were here. It was all very mysterious.”
Ellis froze. “What?”
“The police. Well, one of them. A real nice man. He kept telling me to call him Joe.”
“What did he want?” Ellis asked, trying to keep his voice calm, his optimism of moments earlier vaporized.
“It was pretty silly—even he admitted that. Remember the pendant I lost?”
“Yeah.”
“It turns out that nurse who helped you get it back got in a heap of trouble. You might want to write her and thank her again.”
“What happened, Ma?”
“Nothing much, really. Joe was saying it was just routine but that every little bit of garbage, no matter how small, is tracked. He seemed pretty embarrassed by it, but he had to do his job.”
Ellis was standing up, his hand tight on the receiver. “I don’t understand. What did he want?”
“Are you okay?”
He rolled his eyes, angry at himself for revealing his anxiety. “I’m fine. Just a little tired. Why would the police be interested in your garbage, Ma? It doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s the Homeland Security thing, Ellis. You know that. Everybody’s so cautious nowadays. According to Joe, the pendant being returned must have been picked up by the system somehow, so they sent somebody to check it out. It was just a conversation. You could tell his heart wasn’t in it. I mean, we talked more about you than the pendant.”
Ellis dropped his hand with the phone to his side and stared at the ceiling for a long moment, still hearing his mother’s voice going cheerily on. He felt as if the floor had given way beneath him.
Slowly, he brought the phone back up to his ear. “Ma,” he interrupted her, “did you get this guy’s last name, or what department he was from?”
His mother paused. “I’m not sure. I know he was from Vermont. There was something about a bureau when he introduced himself—at least I think so.”
“The Vermont Bureau of Investigation?”
“Yes. That was it. I’d never heard of them before.”
“I have,” her son admitted sadly, and did his best to wrap up the conversation as quickly as possible.
Afterward he sat on his couch, where he’d first made love to Nancy, and stared out the window. A row of old and battered parked cars littered the lot in the middle of the day as if in testimony of their owners’ success rate at finding employment.
Damn, he thought. What was coming down the tracks at him? He knew goddamned well no cop was interested in a dime-store pendant being extracted from the trash. Especially a cop from the state’s major-crimes squad. They had to have tumbled to the bag he’d stolen to frame Mel, which was still stuffed in his car trunk. But how the hell had they gotten from