Page 157 of Hang on St. Christopher

“I’m asking the questions. I’m going to go upstairs to get something. Don’t move from the chair. If you move from the chair, I’ll consider it a breach of trust and I’ll have to shoot you immediately lest you do anything else to put me in jeopardy. Do you understand?”

“I won’t move.”

“Don’t,” he said, and went upstairs. I spent the next three hundred seconds trying to unhook the Velcro patch in the left sleeve of my leather jacket, to no avail whatever. I’d had it sewn too deep in the sleeve, and my fingers couldn’t reach it.

Wilson came back five minutes later with an ominous-looking sheet of black tarpaulin. He had changed weapons to a Glock, which had also been fitted with a suppressor. He spread the tarpaulin on the concrete floor around the chair. Blood can sometimes sink into concrete if it’s sufficiently porous. And then you’ll never get it out.

“Oh, I have to get one more thing,” he said, and went back to the basement stairs. He paused halfway up. “Remember, if you move a goddamn inch out of that chair, I’m going to kill you immediately.”

There was no play anyway. The basement was below ground. The only way out was up those noisy, creaky wooden stairs.

Shit, shit, shit.

I thought about Beth and Emma. Never seeing them again. This was the ultimate price of selfishness. This American adventure, this desire for closure, this desire to know. Curiosity/cat.

Wilson came back downstairs again with a mug of coffee and an ashtray. He lit another cigarette. “I won’t offer you another cigarette, Duffy. You weren’t lying. You’ve given up. Ever since your police medical in 1989—the medical where your doctor—Dr. Havercamp, I believe his name was—diagnosed you as asthmatic and, quote, borderline unfit for duty, unquote.”

I tried not to act surprised. Americans were always impressed with European sangfroid. “Were my files entertaining?”

“Extremely. For an amateur, you sure have the capacity to get yourself mixed up in a heap of shit.”

“Maybe I’m jinxed.”

“Well, I’m not the one handcuffed to a chair in someone else’s basement,” he said.

“No.”

He took a sip of his coffee.

“You could have made me a hot beverage.”

He shook his head. “Better safe than sorry. Can’t have you flinging it at me, breaking my good china.”

Good china. Americans didn’t say that. Maybe he’d spent a lot of time in the UK, or maybe he had a British mother or grandmother.

“‘The mind is its own place and of itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven.’ThatJohn Milton,” he said.

I wondered why he was trying to impress me. What purpose would it serve if I was going to be food for worms in another five minutes? Maybe that was his thing. Let the guy know that not just anybody was taking him out. He was special. He was good. He studied your file beforehand. He had memorized a whole bunch of old poems at his Ivy League school.

“Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven,” I said, finishing the quote.

He nodded and took another sip of coffee. “I read that in your file too. You’re well educated and, it must be said, a bit of a showboat.”

“What else does it say?”

“Have you read it all?”

“Not allowed.”

“Lot of fascinating stuff... Well, until about a year or so ago, when you moved into the part-time police reserve, whatever that’s supposed to be, and then it goes mysteriously quiet. And I don’t like quiet. We don’t like quiet.”

“Who’s we?”

“I think you know whoweis... Anyhoo, a few phone calls, a few emails, and eventuallyweget another file about Sean Patrick Duffy, semiretired policeman.”

“And what does that one tell you?”

He smiled and took another sip of his coffee. “You see, that one is the one that gives me pause. Because in that one, we’re almost colleagues, you and I.”