Terminal by Andrew Vachss

Author:Andrew Vachss
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780375425288
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-12-01T11:00:00+00:00

Fifteen minutes was enough. We stepped through the shimmed-open fire door in the back. Claw pointed to his right. I followed him down an unpainted plywood-walled corridor, pulling my watch cap down into a ski mask. Music—or something like it—boomed from the front of the building. We passed an unmarked door. I was guessing bathroom, but I didn’t like the idea of a door opening behind me, so I switched stances—still following, but with my back against the wall.

The last door had the kind of sign you buy in a hardware store; peel off the backing tape and stick wherever you want: PRIVATE.

I pulled my short-barreled .357, pointed my left hand at the door twice, once at Claw.

He opened the door, stepped inside.

The girl who came out was moving quick, keeping her head down—like she’d probably just been doing—making sure whoever was outside could see she hadn’t seen them. All I could make out was that she was short and real skinny, long black hair in pigtails, carrying some kind of blue robe in one hand, shoes in the other.

I went through the open door.

Thornton was behind an office-surplus desk, in a red vinyl chair, looking like what he was. Claw was to my left, positioned so he could watch the corridor.

“No! I—”

Thornton cut himself off as he saw the pistol go back inside my jacket. “Just talk,” I said. “Like we did before.”

“Oh! You’re—”

“Yeah. You don’t need to see my face, do you?”

“No. Of course not. I mean, all I want—”

“We know what you want. I’m not here to go over all that again. I’m here for something that could help make it happen.”

“What could I have that I haven’t already given you?”

“You told the big man”—if he noticed that I didn’t call the other man “Claw,” like he did, it didn’t register on his face—“that, before you went down, you tapped them a few times, right?”

“Not for—”

“Yes or no.”

“Yes.”

“Two things first. One, how’d you make contact? Two, how’d they make the delivery?”

“I’d just call their office—”

“They don’t work together, right?”

“Right. I just meant, whichever one I was going to—”

“I get it.”

“I’d just call, say I was an old friend from back in the day. Tell whoever answered that I realized Mr. Whoever wouldn’t be able to come to the phone, but I’d appreciate it if I could leave a number, and Mr. Whoever’s assistant could just leave a message on my machine, telling me when it might be convenient to call.”

“The machine wasn’t where you lived.”

“I’m a lot of things,” he said, superiority slipping back into his voice now that he wasn’t scared, “but none of them are stupid.”

“Okay…”

“I’d always get a call back. There’d be a number for me to call and a time. I’d call—from a phone I was never going near again—and there’d be some man at the other end. Not the one I called, but I wasn’t expecting that. This man—I know they had to be different men, all the times I did this,

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