to try to run?”
“No.”
“You better not, I’d hate to shoot you in the foot or the leg. That’d be the end of your tennis career. Back out.”
I backed out and she backed out with me, so she could block me off if I tried to make a break for it. When we were in the hall, she told me to look around again. I did. Marsden wasn’t there and I told her that.
“Damn.” Then: “You saw the sandwich, didn’t you?”
I nodded. A sandwich and a bottle of water for a man who was bound to his jumbo bed. Bound hand and foot.
“He loved his food,” Liz said. “I ate with him in a restaurant once. He should have had a shovel instead of a fork and spoon. What a pig.”
“Why would you leave him a sandwich he couldn’t eat?”
“I wanted him to look at it, that’s why. Just look. All day, while I went to get you and bring you back. And believe me, a shot in the head is just what he deserved. Do you have any idea how many people he killed with his…his happy poison?”
Who helped him? I thought, and of course didn’t say.
“How long do you think he would have lived, anyway? Two years? Five? I’ve been in his bathroom, Jamie. He’s got a double-wide toilet seat!” She made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a snort of disgust. “Okay, let’s stroll down to the balcony. We’ll see if he’s in the great room. Slow.”
I couldn’t have gone fast if I’d wanted to, because my thighs were trembling and my knees felt like jelly.
“You know how I got the gate code? Marsden’s UPS man. Guy has a hell of a coke habit, I could have slept with his wife if I’d wanted to, he’d’ve been happy to supply her if I kept supplying him. The house code I got from Teddy.”
“Before you killed him.”
“What else was I supposed to do?” Like I was the dumbest kid in class. “He could identify me.”
So can I, I thought, and that brought me back to the thing this lad—me—could whistle for. I’d have to do it, but I still didn’t want to. Because it might not work? Yeah, but not just that. Rub a magic lamp and get a genie, okay, good for you. Rub it and summon a demon—a deadlight—and God might know what would happen, but I didn’t.
We reached the balcony with its low rail and high drop. I peered over.
“Is he down there?”
“No.”
The gun prodded me in the small of my back. “Are you lying?”
“No!”
She gave a harsh sigh. “This isn’t the way it’s supposed to go.”
“I don’t know how it’s supposed to go, Liz. For all I know, he could be outside talking with T—” I stopped.
She took hold of my shoulder and turned me around. There was blood all over her upper lip now—her stress must have been very high—but she was smiling. “You saw Teddy?”
I dropped my eyes. Which was answer enough.
“You sly dog.” She actually laughed. “We’ll go out and take a look if Marsden doesn’t show in here, but for the time being, let’s just wait a little. We can afford to. His latest whore is visiting her relatives in Jamaica or Barbados or somewhere with palm trees, and he doesn’t get company during the week, does all his business by phone these days. He was just lying there when I came in, watching that John Law court show on TV. Christ, I wish he’d at least been wearing some pajamas, you know?”
I said nothing.
“He told me there were no pills, but I could see on his face that he was lying, so I secured him and then cut him a little. Thought that might loosen his tongue, and you know what he did? He laughed at me. Said yes, okay, there was Oxy, a lot of it, but he’d never tell me where it was. ‘Why should I?’ he said. ‘You’re going to kill me anyway.’ That’s when the penny dropped. Couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before. Muy stupido.” She hit the side of her head with the hand holding the gun.
“Me,” I said. “I was the penny that dropped.”
“Yes indeed. So I left him a sandwich and a bottle of water to admire and I went to New York and I got you and we drove back and nobody came and here we are, so where the fuck is he?”
“There,” I said.
“What? Where?”
I pointed. She turned