Peril

But Stark never bluffed. That was, he thought, the ultimate secret of success. If you said you’d walk away, you walked away. You said to yourself, I don’t fucking care, and you turned and you didn’t look back. And if you said you would do a thing, you did it no matter what the cost. You said to yourself, I don’t fucking care, and you did it, and it was done, and you never calculated the risk you’d taken, nor ever the size, be it large or small, either of the penalty or of the reward. Not to care what you won or lost, this was the cold, hard ground of dignity, and standing on that ground was the only thing that made life bearable.

Stark knew that he could convey all of this in a single deadly glance. But he also knew that inevitably some people would fail to read that glance correctly. And so, on those very rare occasions when he’d had some doubt that the point was made, he’d simply ratcheted up the stakes, drawn the nine-millimeter from his jacket, and kindly asked the offending person to open his mouth. The object of Stark’s attention always did so, his eyes widening as Stark pressed the blunt steel barrel into their gaping mouths, careful to scrape the sensitive roof with the metal sight, and thus cause that little nip of pain that so eloquently underlined the desperate nature of the case.

The problem at the moment, however, was that Stark was no longer sure of what his assignment was. Mortimer had asked for a favor, but reluctantly. He’d never done that before, and it was this odd twist in the road that now chewed at Stark relentlessly, urging him to get to the bottom of Mortimer’s strange behavior.

But how? He decided he would pretend that he believed Mortimer’s story. He would tell himself that whatever peculiarities he sensed in the deal might well be harmless, and on that assumption he would work in the normal way, using whatever information Mortimer brought him as the springboard for further investigation.

He took a regional map from the file and spread it across his desk. Since the runaway wife hadn’t taken her own car, the husband would first need to determine if his wife had taken a cab either to her destination or to some other form of transportation. There were several small airports in the vicinity of Montauk. It would not be hard to determine if the woman had used any of them. There were also several bus depots in the area, as well as a single commuter train. The bus or train could have taken her into New York, from which she could have gotten passage to anywhere on earth.

The trick, then, was to narrow the field, shrink the wide world of possibility into a small, tight knot of likelihood. But that couldn’t be done until the husband supplied the added information he’d promised Mortimer. Until it came, Stark could only wait.

But waiting was hard, and even as a child Stark had noticed how little patience he had for the undone deed. He liked to be on the hunt, and if he were haunted by anything, dreaded anything, it was the idle time between jobs. During those intervals, he felt his life grow numb. It did not surprise him that soldiers of fortune were prone to suicide. For how could a man who thirsted for danger possibly endure the absence of it, the long days when he felt himself imprisoned in an empty and unlighted room. He knew the usual means by which such men made the clock move. Drugs. Alcohol. Whores. But the drugs wore off, and the alcohol drained away, and the whore finally had to dress and find another john. And after that, the soldier lay in the dull aftermath and dreamed of jungle firefights, the thrill of being cornered, wounded, left for dead, the ecstasy that ever accompanies the narrowest escape. Denied this primal excitement, how banal and uneventful the rest of it must seem. And so why not press the barrel to your head if the hourly alternative offered nothing more than the unbearable pall of the commonplace?

Stark drew the nine-millimeter from the drawer of his desk, caressed it with affection, thought of Marisol, and marveled with what dreadful accuracy Neruda had hit the mark, understood that in the sickly sweet smell of aftershave the total horror was revealed.

ABE

Abe recognized the man who came toward him from the front of the bar as a semi-regular, a guy who came in sporadically, took a place in the darkest corner he could find, and ordered scotch without designating any particular brand. He wore a faded black suit, with shiny pants that fit him badly, and an old hat that looked as if it had been run over by a truck, then pounded back into shape. Over the years, they’d had a few conversations, but Abe had learned little beyond the guy’s first name and the vague notion that he was some kind of investigator, though exactly what type the man had never said, save that he “found people.”

“How you doing, Morty?” he asked now.

“Abe,” Mortimer said. He slid onto the stool opposite.

Abe smiled. “What’ll you have?”

“Scotch,” Mortimer said.