Keenan jerked as if he’d been shot, but the Sarge’s dipped-in-concrete face never twitched. He turned around and put his hands on the wall, leaning his weight on them. Keenan reluctantly followed suit. I frisked him first and got a stupid little.32 with a three-inch barrel. A gun like that, you could put the muzzle against a guy’s head and still miss when you pulled the trigger. I threw it over my shoulder and heard it bounce off one of the cars. Sarge was clean — and it was a relief to step away from him.
‘We’re going into the house. You first, Keenan, then Sarge, then me. Without incident, okay?’
We all trooped up the steps and into the kitchen. It was one of those germless chrome-and-tile jobs that looks like it was spit whole out of some mass-production womb in the Midwest somewhere, the work of hearty Methodist assholes who all look like Mr. Goodwrench and smell like Cherry Blend tobacco. I doubt if it ever needed anything so vulgar as cleaning; Keenan probably just closed the doors and turned on the hidden sprinklers once a week.
I paraded them through into the living room, another treat for the eyes. A pansy decorator who never got over his crush on Ernest Hemingway had apparently done it. There was a flagstone fireplace almost as big as an elevator car, a teak buffet table with a moosehead mounted above it, and a drinks cart stashed below a gunrack loaded with premium artillery. The stereo had turned itself off.
I waved the gun at the couch. ‘One on each end.’
They sat, Keenan on the right, Sarge on the left. The Sarge looked even bigger sitting down.
An ugly, dented scar twisted its way through his slightly overgrown crewcut. I put his weight at about two-thirty, and wondered why a man with the size and physical presence of Mike Tyson owned a Volkswagen.
I grabbed an easy chair and dragged it over Keenan’s quicksand-colored rug until it was in front and between them. I sat down and let the.45 rest on my thigh. Keenan stared at it like a bird stares at a snake. The Sarge, on the other hand, was staring at me like he was the snake and I was the bird. ‘Now what?’ he asked.
‘Let’s talk about maps and money,’ I said.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Sarge said. ‘All I know is that little boys shouldn’t play with guns.’
‘How’s Cappy MacFarland these days?’ I asked casually.
It didn’t get jack shit from the Sarge, but Keenan popped his cork. ‘He knows. He knows!’ The words shot out of him like bullets.
‘Shut up!’ the Sarge told him. ‘Shut up your goddam trap!’
Keenan moaned a little. This was one part of the scenario he had never imagined. I smiled.
‘He’s right, Sarge.’ I said. ‘I know. Almost all of it.’
‘Who are you?’
‘No one you know. A friend of Barney’s.’
‘Barney who?’ Sarge asked indifferently. ‘Barney Google, with the goo-goo-googly eyes?”
‘He wasn’t dead, Sarge. Not quite dead.’
Sarge turned a slow and murderous look on Keenan. Keenan shuddered and opened his mouth.
‘Don’t talk,’ Sarge said to him. ‘Not one fucking word. I’ll snap your neck like a chicken if you do.’
Keenan’s mouth shut with a snap.
Sarge looked at me again. ‘What does almost all of it mean?’
‘Everything but the fine details. I know about the armored car. The island. Cappy MacFarland.
How you and Keenan and some bastard named Jagger killed Barney. And the map. I know about that.’
‘It wasn’t the way he told you,’ Sarge said. ‘He was going to cross us.’
‘He couldn’t cross the street,’ I said. ‘He was just a patsy who could drive.’
He shrugged; it was like watching a minor earthquake. ‘Okay. Be as dumb as you look.’
‘I knew Barney had something on as early as last March. I just didn’t know what. And then one night he had a gun. This gun. How did you connect with him, Sarge?’
‘A mutual friend — someone who did time with him. We needed a driver who knew eastern Maine and the Bar Harbor area. Keenan and I went to see him and laid it out for him. He liked it.’
‘I did time with him in the Shank,’ I said. ‘I liked him. You couldn’t help but like him. He was dumb, but he was a good kid. He needed a keeper more than a partner.’
‘George and Lennie,’ Sarge sneered.
‘Good to know you spent your own jail time improving what passes for your mind, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘We were thinking about a bank in Lewiston. He couldn’t wait for me to finish doping it out. So now he’s underground.’
‘Jeepers, this is really sad,’ Sarge said. ‘I’m gettin, like, all soft and mushy inside.’
I picked up the gun and showed him the muzzle, and for a second or two he was the bird and it was the snake. ‘One more wisecrack and I’ll put a bullet in your belly. Do you believe that?’
His tongue flickered in and out with startling quickness, lapped across his lower lip, and disappeared again. He nodded. Keenan was frozen. He looked like he wanted to retch but didn’t quite dare.
‘He told me it was big time, a big score,’ I resumed. ‘That’s all I could get out of him. He took off on April third. Two days later four guys knock over the Portland-Bangor Federated truck just outside of Carmel. All three guards dead. The newspapers said the robbers ran two roadblocks in a souped-up ’78 Plymouth. Barney had a ’78 up on blocks, thinking about turning it into a stacker. I’m betting Keenan put up the front money for him to turn it into something a little better and a lot faster.’
I looked at him. Keenan’s face was the color of cheese.
‘On May sixth I get a card postmarked Bar Harbor, but that doesn’t mean anything — there are dozens of little islands that channel their mail through there. A mailboat does the circuit, picks it up. The card says: ‘Mom and family fine, store doing good. See you in July.’ It was signed with Barney’s middle name. I leased a cottage on the coast, because Barney knew that would be the deal. July comes and goes, no Barney.’
‘Musta had a terminal hard-on by then, kid, right?’ Sarge said. I guess he wanted me to be sure I hadn’t buffaloed him.
I looked at him remotely. ‘He showed up in early August. Courtesy of your buddy Keenan, Sarge. He forgot about the automatic bilge pump in the boat. You thought the chop would sink it quick enough, right, Keenan? But you thought he was dead, too. I had a yellow blanket spread out on Frenchman’s Point every day. Visible for miles. Easy to spot. Still, he was lucky.’
‘Too lucky,’ Sarge almost spat.
‘One thing I’m curious about — did he know before the job that the money was new, all the serial numbers recorded? That you couldn’t even sell it to a currency-junker in the Bahamas for three or four years?’
‘He knew,’ the Sarge rumbled, and I was surprised to find myself believing him. ‘And nobody was planning to junk the dough. He knew that, too, kid. I think he was counting on that Lewiston job you mentioned for ready cash, but whatever he was or wasn’t counting on, he knew the score and said he could live with it. Christ, why not? Say we had to wait ten years to go back for that dough and split it up. What’s ten years to a kid like Barney? Shit, he would have been all of thirty-five. I’d be sixty-one.’
‘What about Gappy MacFarland? Did Barney know about him, too?’
‘Yes. Cappy came with the deal. A good man. A pro. He got cancer last year. Inoperable. And he owed me a favor.’
‘So the four of you went out to Cappy’s island,’ I said. ‘A little nobody-on-it named Carmen’s Folly. Cappy buried the money and made a map.’
‘That part was Jagger’s idea,’ Sarge said. ‘We didn’t want to split hot money — too tempting.
But we didn’t want to leave all the swag in one pair of hands, either. Cappy MacFarland was the perfect solution.’
‘Tell me about the map.’
‘I thought we’d get to that,’ Sarge said with a wintry smile.
‘Don’t tell him!’ Keenan cried out hoarsely.
Sarge turned to him and gave him a look that would have melted bar steel. ‘Shut up. I can’t lie and 1 can’t stonewall, thanks to you. You know what I hope, Keenan? I hope you weren’t really looking forward to seeing in the new century.’
‘Your name’s in a letter,’ Keenan said wildly. ‘If anything happens to me, your name’s in a letter!’
‘Cappy made a good map,’ the Sarge said, as if Keenan were not there at all. ‘He had some draftsman training in Joliet. He cut it into quarters. One for each of us. We were going to have a reunion on July fourth, five years later. Talk it over. Maybe decide to wait another five years, maybe decide to put the pieces together right then. But there was trouble.’