MASON WATCHED GREEN DRINKING coffee from the Styrofoam cup. Mason was sitting behind the wheel of the Chevy, holding his own cup to warm his hands. The coffee Green had fetched on command from a coffee shop on Sixth Avenue was scalding, impossible—in Mason’s view—to drink as yet. But somehow Green was slurping it down. How did he do it? Mason watched the unconcerned Green and decided there was something wrong with him. Maybe he was impervious to pain. That was frightening. It was all right to be resistant to pain. You were supposed to resist it, master it. But nobody was impervious. Impervious was crazy.
It was a dirty, dishwatery, dispiriting morning, if you were prey to such fluctuations in the weather. Fortunately Mason wasn’t. But the rain was steady, washing muck out of the atmosphere, and Mason didn’t have an umbrella. Which was another reason why Green had to go get the coffee. That, and because Mason was senior.
Neither of them seemed to need much sleep. Green had been all pumped up when he’d come back to the car after killing the man who’d walked in on him at Cunningham’s place. He had wanted to sleep. His motor had been racing when he told Mason what had happened. Mason had calmed him down, thinking to himself that Green seemed to have enjoyed the killing too much. Some guys got off on killing people, said it was better than the best lay of their lives. Mason thought maybe Green was one of those guys. That was crazy too. Mason was pretty uninvolved when it came to killing somebody. If you had to do it, you did it and forgot about it. He’d even regretted it once, when he’d had to do a job for the IRS. He’d killed a man who had too much inside dope on an IRS operation involving heavy skimming by a couple of top regional collection people tied back into Washington. Mason hadn’t wanted to do it. He hated the IRS more than he’d have believed he could have hated anything. As far as he was concerned, they were the only really bad guys.
Green smacked his lips noisily and turned his gaze on Mason. “Good coffee. Don’t you want yours?”
“Yes. I want it.”
Mason wondered about Cunningham’s absurd departure from Miss Blandings’s apartment. Something horrible seemed to have happened to the man, but Mason couldn’t tell what. He’d looked like a threshing machine had driven over him.
Greco’s arrival had taken him by surprise. Who was this guy with the eye patch? When he didn’t come out, though he’d passed across the front windows of her apartment, Mason decided he must be her lover. Maybe she’d stay in bed with him all day and forget about the Director. It would be so much easier that way. All Mason wanted to do was keep her out of the picture without revealing himself. He tried to recall the last time things had gone easily. He couldn’t.
The woman in the raincoat. She meant nothing to Mason. And when she eventually left, he hadn’t been sure she’d even visited the Blandings apartment, though he thought she’d pressed that button.
Once Miss Blandings and Eyepatch left, Green said: “Shouldn’t we follow them?”
“The apartment must be empty now,” Mason mused.
“Weren’t we supposed to keep an eye on her? Keep her out of this?”
“Don’t worry. It’s my hindquarters, not yours. The Director’s right where he should be, everything’s fine.”
“I don’t know,” Green said doubtfully.
“I do, Greenie. Relax.”
“I guess you’re the boss.”
“Nice you remember that. Now let’s go take a look in there.”
“What for?”
“Maybe you’ll find somebody to shoot.”
“What?”
“Maybe we’ll find the manuscript the General’s afraid might be floating around. Maybe she wrote it. Maybe the guy with the eye patch wrote it. Let’s just go see, Greenie.”
A few minutes later Mason was staring into the cold eye of a very large bird who had ostentatiously stalked into his cage and slipped the bolt into place when the two men had entered the room. Mason regarded the beak and thought, There is a bird with one hell of an edge.
“Polly want a cracker?” Green said softly.
The bird stared hard at him, then relieved himself on the newspaper in the bottom of the cage.
Mason spoke to the bird. “Manners, manners.” The bird cocked an eye at him and came closer, recognizing a kindred spirit.
Green was looking through cardboard boxes full of what might be the manuscript in question. He was kneeling beside them when the front door swung open again. Mason heard the clicking of the latch and turned to see who’d come in.
Two men came quickly into the room. One of them already had a pistol out of his pocket. There was a clunky, tubular silencer on the barrel. He heard the puffing sound and the slug digging into the plastered wall behind him. The big bird started squawking. Mason hit the deck, rolled behind the bulk of the pool table.
Green was very good with a gun. So was Mason, but there was a difference. Green was the fastest with a gun Mason had ever seen.
The man who had missed Mason with the first shot had done all the shooting he was going to do.
Green was still on his knees but had the nine-millimeter Baretta out. There were three quick puffing sounds, whoof-whoof-whoof, and Mason peered around the massive carved leg of the pool table to see one man fall sideways into a stereo cabinet, knocking a lamp onto the floor. The other man sagged back into the hallway, dying as he squeezed off a final shot that took a chunk out of the ceiling above the pool table. The sprinkling of plaster drifted down on Mason’s hair and glasses and made him sneeze. He had finally gotten his gun out of the shoulder holster, and there was almost no one left to shoot.
Green stood up. He wasn’t even shaking. One of the men he’d shot made a dying noise from behind the couch.
Green looked at Mason and smiled.
“You’re a dangerous man, Greenie.”
“Yeah.”
Green’s smile broadened.
Mason raised his gun and shot Greenie square in the middle of his smile.