Текст книги "Hit and Run"

Автор книги: Block Lawrence

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

30

Donny got an offer on the house right away. It was less than he was asking but still well above his costs, and he decided not to hold out for more. “The sooner we’re out of one deal, the sooner we can get into the next,” he told Keller, and after the deal closed Keller’s one-third share of the net was just over eleven thousand dollars. He hadn’t been keeping track of his hours, but knew his profit amounted to a good deal more than twelve dollars an hour.

He came home with the news, and you’d have thought Julia already heard. The table was set with the good china, and there were flowers in a vase. “I guess someone told you,” he said, but no one had, and she congratulated him and kissed him and said the flowers and all were because she had news of her own. They’d offered her a full-time teaching position for the coming year.

“A permanent position,” she said, “and I wanted to tell them that nothing’s permanent in an uncertain world, but I decided to keep my mouth shut.”

“Probably wise.”

“That means more money, of course, but it also means benefits. And it means not having to make the acquaintance of a new batch of brats every month or so. Instead I’ll get one batch of brats and be stuck with them for the whole year.”

“That’s great.”

“On the downside, it also means working five days a week for forty weeks a year, not just when some teacher gets sick or decides to move to I don’t know where.”

“Wichita?”

“It ties a person down, but would it keep us from doing anything we really wanted to do? What’s great is having the summers off, and if you ever want to get away from New Orleans, summer’s the time when you want to do it. I think I should tell them yes.”

“You mean you haven’t already?”

“Well, I wanted to discuss it with you. You think I should go for it?”

He did, and said so, and she served a dish she’d adapted from a New Orleans cookbook, a rich and savory stew of meat and okra served over rice, with a green salad, and lemon pie for dessert. The pie was from a little bakery on Magazine Street, and while he was tucking into a second piece she told him she’d bought him a present.

“I thought the pie was the present,” he said.

“It’s good, isn’t it? No, but this was also from Magazine Street, just two doors up from the bakery. I wonder if you ever noticed it.”

“Noticed what?”

“The shop. I don’t know, maybe I made a mistake. Maybe you won’t like it, maybe it’ll just be a case of throwing salt in old wounds.”

“You know,” he said, “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Do I get a present or don’t I?”

“It’s not exactly a present. I mean, I didn’t wrap it. It’s not the kind of present you would wrap.”

“That’s good, because it’ll save the time it would take to unwrap it, and we can use that time having this conversation.”

“Am I being nuts? ‘Yes, Julia, you’re being nuts.’ Don’t go anywhere.”

“Where would I go?”

She came back with a flat paper bag, so in a sense the present was wrapped after all, if informally. “I just hope I didn’t do the wrong thing,” she said, handing it to him, and he reached into the bag and drew out a copy of Linn’s Stamp News.

“There’s this shop, it’s not much more than a hole in the wall. Stamps and coins and political campaign buttons. And other hobby items, but mostly those three. Do you know the shop I’m talking about?”

He didn’t.

“And I walked in, and I didn’t want to buy you stamps, because I thought that probably wouldn’t have been a good idea—”

“You were right about that.”

“But I saw this paper, and didn’t you mention it once? I think you did.”

“I may have.”

“You used to read it, didn’t you?”

“I was a subscriber.”

“And I thought should I get it for him or not? Because I know your stamps are gone, and how much they meant to you, and this might only make you feel the loss more. But then I thought maybe you’d enjoy reading the articles, and who knows, you might even want to, I don’t know, start another collection, although that might be impossible after having lost everything. Then I thought, oh, for God’s sake, Julia, give the little man two dollars and fifty cents and go home. So I did.”

“So you did.”

“Now if it was a really terrible idea,” she said, “just put it back in the bag it came in and hand it to me, and I’ll guarantee you never have to look at it again, and we can both pretend this never happened.”

“You’re wonderful,” he said. “Have I ever told you that?”

“You have, but we’ve always been upstairs. This is the first time you’ve told me on the ground floor.”

“Well, you are.”

“The present’s okay?”

“Yes, and the future’s promising.”

“I meant—”

“I know what you meant. The present, this present, is more than okay. I don’t know if I’ll find the articles interesting, I don’t know if I’ll even want to look at the ads, much less do anything about them. But all of that is something I ought to find out.”

“I live another day,” she said. “Why don’t I pour you another cup of coffee, and why don’t you take Linn’s into the den?”

He looked at the front page and wondered why he was wasting his time. The lead article was about the high prices realized at an auction in Lucerne of an exceptional collection of stamps and postal history from Imperial Russia, before the 1917 revolution. Less prominent was coverage of the discovery of an error, a recent U.S. coil stamp with one color missing, and an article about reactions in the hobby to the post office’s announcement of new stamps planned for the coming year.

The same stories, he thought, week after week and year after year. The details changed, the numbers changed, but the more it all changed, the more it remained the same. He had to check the date of the paper to reassure himself it wasn’t an issue he’d already seen, months or years before.

The same dim-witted letters to the editor, too, the outpourings of the same self-involved malcontents, this one whining at the cost of keeping up with the huge crop of new issues, the next furious because the idiots at the post office insisted on ruining stamps on his mail by defacing them with heavy cancellations, and others joining in the endless debate on how to interest young boys and girls in the hobby. The only way you could do that, Keller figured, was to find a way to make philately more exciting than video games, and there was no way that would work, not even if you came out with a series of stamps that exploded.

Keller turned next to “Kitchen Table Philately,” which he’d heard was the paper’s most popular feature. This had always struck Keller as unfathomable, yet he had to admit he found it irresistible himself. Each week, one of two pseudonymous reviewers – interchangeable, as far as Keller could determine – analyzed in excruciating detail a mixture of stamps he’d bought for a small sum, often as little as a dollar, from a Linn’s advertiser. This week was typical, with Mr. Anonymous grumpy beyond belief because his two-buck assortment of stamps had taken a whole two weeks to reach his mailbox, and unhappy as well because fully 11 percent of the mixture’s contents were small definitive stamps rather than the large commemoratives promised. Christ, he thought, give it a rest, will you? If you can’t actually manage to get a life, can’t you at least pretend you’ve got one?

And then something curious happened. He read another article, and got caught up in what he was reading. The next thing he knew he was looking at one of the ads, a listing of Latin American issues offered by a worldwide dealer in Escondido with whom Keller had done business over the years. Like most listings, this one consisted of nothing but catalog numbers, indicators of condition, and prices, so it wasn’t really something a person could read, but Keller’s eyes were drawn to it, and from there he found his way to another ad, and after that he put down the paper and went upstairs for a minute. He came down with his Scott catalog and returned to the den, picked up Linn’s, and resumed where he’d left off.

“Nicholas?”

He looked up, yanked out of his reverie.

“I just wanted to let you know I’m going upstairs. You’ll turn off the lights when you come up?”

He closed the catalog, set the paper aside. “I’ll come up now.”

“If you’re having fun—”

“I’ve got an early day tomorrow,” he said. “And that’s all the fun I can stand for one night.”

He showered and brushed his teeth, and she was in bed waiting for him. They made love, and afterward he lay with his eyes open and said, “That was very sweet.”

“For me, too.”

“Well, just now, sure. I meant bringing me the paper. That was very thoughtful of you.”

“I’m just glad it turned out all right. I’m assuming that it did?”

“I got caught up in it,” he said. “But do you want to hear something really pathetic? I found an ad with what looked like some interesting material, and I actually went upstairs to get my catalog.”

“To check the value?”

“No, that’s not why I wanted it. I may have told you that I used the catalog as a checklist. So I brought it downstairs in order to be able to tell whether or not a given stamp was one I needed for my collection.”

“That makes sense,” she said. “I don’t see what’s so pathetic about it.”

“What’s pathetic,” he said, “is I need all the stamps for my collection, everything ever made except for Sweden one through five. Because, outside of those five stamps I had no business buying, I don’t have a collection.”

“Oh.”

“And here’s the best part. There was a point when I realized it was pathetic – or ridiculous, or whatever you want to call it. But that didn’t stop me. I went on working out just what stamps I would buy to help fill in the collection I no longer own.”

He almost missed it.

He worked late the following day, and by the time he got home all he was up for was dinner and an hour of TV before they went up to bed. The day after that he was off, and spent the morning doing a tentative preliminary pruning of the shrubbery, trying to find a line of compromise between the plants’ desire to grow tall and his and Julia’s preference for a little more light and visibility on the front porch. He stopped a little after noon, wondering if he’d lopped off too much or too little.

Late in the afternoon they took her car and drove to a seafood shack on the Gulf just across the state line in Mississippi. Donny and Claudia had enthused over it, and it was all right, but on the way home they agreed it wasn’t worth the time it took to get there and back. They went inside, and she had a couple of loads of wash she’d been meaning to do, and Keller caught sight of Linn’s on the chair in the den and picked it up so he could toss it out. Because he’d read most of the articles, and he didn’t collect stamps anymore, so why keep the thing around?

But instead he sat down with it and found himself leafing through it, and he tried to figure out a way to collect without a collection. One possibility, he thought, was to continue his collection as if he still owned it, buying only stamps he hadn’t already owned, and keeping them not in an album (because he already had albums, or had had them) but in a box or stockbook. The premise would be that they were awaiting eventual placement in his albums when they found their way back to him, which of course would never happen, which meant he’d never have to mount the stamps but could concentrate exclusively upon obtaining them.

In a sense, he’d be collecting stamps the way an ornithologist collected birds. Each new bird, once it had been spotted and identified, would go on the birder’s life list; he didn’t need physical possession of the creature in order to claim it as his own. By the same token, the stamps Keller had owned, the stamps that had been taken from him, were still his. They were on his life list.

He’d still use the Scott catalog as his checklist. When he bought a new stamp, he’d circle its number in his catalog so he wouldn’t make a mistake and buy it again. The new acquisitions, he thought, could be circled in another color, blue or green, so he’d be able to tell at a glance whether his acquisition came before or after the date the collection disappeared, and whether he owned a particular stamp in fact or in theory.

It was deeply weird, he knew, but was it that much stranger than collecting stamps in the first place?

He turned the pages of the newspaper, too much involved in his own thoughts to pay much attention to what passed before his eyes. So he’d probably looked at and looked away from the small ad before it ever registered.

Toward the back of the paper, but before you got to the classifieds, Linn’s gave over the better part of a page to small-space ads, one or two inches tall and a column wide, that amounted essentially to dealer’s announcements. One might proclaim oneself a specialist in France and its colonies, or in the British Empire before 1960. There was one chap who’d had the same ad running for all the years Keller had subscribed, offering AMG issues, the stamps produced by the Allied Military Government for use in occupied Germany and Austria after the end of the Second World War. There he was, Keller noted, still at it, word for precious word, and—

Two columns over, he saw this:

JUST PLAIN KLASSICS

Satisfaction Guaranteed

www.jpktoxicwaste.com

Keller stared at the ad. He blinked several times, but it was still there when he looked at it again. It was impossible, but unless he’d dozed off and was dreaming, the ad was really there, and it couldn’t be, because it was impossible.

There had been times in his life when he’d been dreaming, realized it was a dream, and willed himself out of it – but remained in the dream, even though he thought he’d returned to waking consciousness. Was this like that? He got up, walked around, and sat down again, wondering whether he was really walking around or had just incorporated the walking into his dream. He picked up the paper, and he read some of the other ads, to see if they were the usual thing or the sort of gibberish dreams were apt to produce.

As far as he could tell, they were okay. And the ad from Just Plain Klassics was still there, and still impossible.

Because the only person who could possibly have placed that ad was dead, shot twice in the head and burned up in a fire in White Plains.

31

It took him a few blocks out of his way, but Keller drove along Magazine Street to get a look at the stamp shop. He spotted it, but only because he knew where to look for it. The signage was minimal, and that explained why he’d never noticed it before.

He thought of stopping in, to see if they had any other issues of Linn’s around. That way he could find out if the ad had run before, but why bother? What difference did it make?

Ten minutes later he was parked across the street from an Internet café, where a kid who looked more like a college wrestler than your prototypical geek pointed him to a computer. He hadn’t sat in front of one since he was bidding for stamps on eBay, back before the flight to Iowa. His laptop had been gone by the time he returned to his New York apartment, and he’d never even considered replacing it. What for?

Julia, who’d sold her own computer before moving back from Wichita, had talked about getting another, but with about the same sense of urgency as she talked about cleaning out the attic. It might happen, possibly even in their lifetime, but you couldn’t call it a high-priority item.

Even if she’d had a computer, he wouldn’t have used it for this. A public machine in a public setting, far from his own neighborhood, was what the situation called for.

He settled in, booted up Explorer, and typed in www.jpktoxicwaste.com. And clicked on Go.

The headline could have been a coincidence. A dealer specializing in the classic issues from philately’s first century, 1840 to 1940, might chance upon Just Plain Classics as a name for his business venture, and might decide to distort the spelling as an homage, say, to Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

If so, he’d managed to hit on a name that resonated with Keller. Not so much because those were the stamps Keller collected, since he was hardly unique in this respect, but because the initials were his. JPK = John Paul Keller – or, as Dot was apt to point out, Just Plain Keller.

The owner of Just Plain Klassics hadn’t troubled to include his name, but he wasn’t unique in that respect. He hadn’t included a postal address, either, or a phone or fax number, but limited himself to the URL of his website. A lot of philatelic business was conducted on the Web these days, and plenty of classified ads limited their contact information to an email address, but this was unusual in a display ad.

But what nailed it was the URL itself. www.jpktoxicwaste.com.

Years ago, back when the old man was still running things, he and Dot had been troubled by the fact that their boss was turning down job after job for no apparent reason. Accordingly they went proactive before either of them had become familiar with the term, and Dot placed an ad in a Soldier of Fortune imitator called Mercenary Times. Odd jobs wanted, removals a specialty – something along those lines, with the firm’s name given as Toxic Waste, and a post office box in Hastings or Yonkers, someplace like that.

JPK. Toxic Waste.

Coincidence? It had about as much chance of being coincidental as his trip to Des Moines. But if it wasn’t a coincidence, then it was a visitation from the dead, because no one but Dot could possibly have placed that ad.

The website, when the computer found its way there through the ether, was anticlimactic. Just the initials at the top, JPK in plain boldface capitals. Nothing about stamps, nothing about toxic waste. Nothing, in fact, but a very brief notice announcing that the site was under construction, along with a mathematical formula that made no sense to him:

19? = 28 x 24 + 37 – 34 ÷ 6

Huh?

He got on Google, tried various permutations. JPK, just plain klassics, JPK Stamps. Nothing. If you were going to replace the first c in classics with a k, why not do the same with the last one? He tried JPK klassiks, and JPK classics, and got nowhere. Google returned no end of hits for toxic waste, none of which he found himself eager to pursue, and when he tried to type in the formula, or equation, or whatever it was, he couldn’t figure out how to reproduce some of the symbols. He did the best he could, and Google was quick to tell him that his search did not match any documents. He gave up and went back to the original URL, jpktoxicwaste.com, and got the same page all over again, advising him once more that the site was under construction, and providing him with the same formula. This time he copied it off the site, then returned to Google and pasted it in, and didn’t get any hits.

Do the math, Keller.

He worked it out with pencil and paper. It looked algebraic, and the algebra he’d studied in high school was long gone, but maybe he could get somewhere with simple arithmetic. 28 times 24 was 672, plus 37 was 709, minus 34 was 675 (though why you would add 37 only to subtract 34 a moment later was beyond him). Divide all that by 6 and it came to 112.5. So 19 little triangles was equal to 112.5, which meant one of them was what? The answer wouldn’t come out even, and by the time he’d worked it out to nine decimal places – 5.921052631 – he decided that couldn’t be right.

Easy as pi, he thought. Maybe it was just Internet flotsam, stray debris floating in cyberspace and preying on the unwary.

You’d think a place that called itself a café, Internet or otherwise, would have coffee available. Keller asked, and the wrestler shook his head and pointed at a machine prepared to dispense Coca-Cola and a variety of energy drinks.

Keller found a Starbucks on the next block and splurged on a latte. He took it to a table along with his work sheets, looked at the original equation. Drop the symbols, he thought, and what did you get?

19 triangles equals 282437346.

He dug out his wallet, found his Social Security card, examined it, and added hyphens accordingly.

282-43-7346.

Where did the 19 triangles come in? And what good was a Social Security number, anyway?

Oh.

Forget the triangles, and use all eleven digits, and move the hyphens around a little…

1-928-243-7346.

Oh.

Northern Arizona. 928 was the area code for northern Arizona.

He didn’t know anybody in northern Arizona. He didn’t know anybody anywhere in Arizona, not that he could think of. The last time he could remember being anywhere in the state was a while ago, and he’d gone to Tucson on business. The person he was seeking had lived in a gated community surrounding a members-only golf course. Tucson was in southern Arizona, and its area code was 520.

As far as he could see, there were three possibilities.

First, it was all coincidence. That was impossible, because even the long arm of coincidence had a limited reach. It was too complicated a coincidence, of the sort it would take for a monkey at a typewriter to produce Hamlet. Even if he started out okay, sooner or later you’d get a line that read, “To be or not to be, that is the gezorgenplatz.”

Second, the message was from Dot. True, she was dead, but she’d found a way to communicate from beyond the grave. She’d ruled out materializing in front of him, or whispering in his ear, because she’d figured it would spook him, so instead she’d come up with this brilliant idea of running a cryptic ad in Linn’s. But that was impossible, too, because how could someone in the spirit world get an ad in a newspaper?

Third, the message was from the irrepressible Call-Me-Al. He’d know about Keller’s hobby, because it was probably his bully boys who’d carted the collection away. He’d know Keller’s initials, even if he didn’t know that they stood for Just Plain Keller, and he could have hit on Just Plain Klassics by coincidence. But, even if that struck him as a reasonable way to continue the hunt for Keller, would he go so far as to disguise the phone number, counting on Keller to puzzle it out? I mean, why bother? He didn’t have to worry that someone else would get wind of him. All he had to do was put the bait out there and wait for Keller to take the hook.

Anyway, it was flat-out impossible that he would have included the toxic-waste business. Dot and Keller were the only two people on the planet to whom that would make any sense. The case was an old one, and everybody connected with it was long dead, and the murder weapon, if you were hung up on coincidence, was at the bottom of the same river that received the Nissan Sentra, albeit hundreds of miles to the north. And Dot wouldn’t have given up the phrase toxic waste, not even under torture, because it would never occur to her. “Now, woman, give us something to draw him in, or we’ll pull out your toenails.” “Toxic waste, toxic waste!” Yeah, right. Not a chance.

So there were three possibilities, and they were all impossible.

One more possibility. Dot, before she was killed, decided to make a run for it. First, though, she wanted to set things up so she could get a message to Keller when the time came. And how could she do that? Why, through an ad in Linn’s, and a phone number left on a website, something he could access without leaving a trail.

You could set up a website and it would stay up unattended for a long time. You could place a Linn’s ad, pay a whole year or more in advance, and just let it run until it ran out. And maybe the website was under construction, maybe she’d planned to make things a little clearer for Keller. Maybe she’d done this early on, setting up the site, ordering the ad, and then the bastards broke in and killed her, and the ad and the website were out there to no purpose. And, until Julia brought home the paper, to no effect.

Was all of this possible? He didn’t know, and couldn’t think about it anymore. Because no matter how much thought he gave it, when all was said and done there was really only one thing to do.

He found a place where he could buy a prepaid cell phone, and made sure it was set to block caller ID. The police might be capable of determining where the phone was when the call was placed, but it wasn’t the police who had run the ad or set up the website, and if Al had such technological forces at his command, well, that was just a chance Keller would have to take.

Even so, he got on I-10 and drove halfway to Baton Rouge before pulling into a gas station and making the call.

He was expecting no answer at all, or maybe coo-wheeeet!, but on the third ring someone picked up. And then a voice he’d never expected to hear again said, “I just hope this isn’t another damn telemarketer in Bangalore. Well? Whoever you are, say something.”