Tripwire

Stone shrugged, helplessly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then I’ll explain,” Tony said. “We want you to comply. We want your signature on a piece of paper. So how do we get that?”

“You’ll never get it, you bastard,” Stone said. “I’ll go bankrupt first, damn it. Chapter eleven. You won’t get a damn thing from me. Not a thing. You’ll be in court five years, minimum.”

Tony shook his head patiently, like a grade-school teacher hearing the wrong answer for the hundredth time in a long career.

“Do whatever you want,” Stone said to him. “I won’t give you my company.”

“We could hurt you,” Tony said.

Stone’s eyes dropped through the gloom to the desktop. His tie was still lying there, right on top of the rough gouges from the hook.

“Take Mr. Hobie’s pants off,” Tony screamed.

“No, I won’t, damn it,” Stone screamed back.

The guy at Tony’s shoulder reached under his arm. There was a squeak of leather. Stone stared at him, incredulous. The guy came out with a small black handgun. He used one arm and aimed it, eye-level, straight out. He advanced around the desk toward Stone. Nearer and nearer. Stone’s eyes were wide and staring. Fixed on the gun. It was aimed at his face. He was shaking and sweating. The guy was stepping quietly, and the gun was coming closer, and Stone’s eyes were crossing, following it in. The gun came to rest with the muzzle on his forehead. The guy was pressing with it. The muzzle was hard and cold. Stone was shaking. Leaning backward against the pressure. Stumbling, trying to focus on the black blur that was the gun. He never saw the guy’s other hand balling into a fist. Never saw the blow swinging in. It smashed hard into his gut and he went down like a sack, legs folding, squirming and gasping and retching.

“Take the pants off, you piece of shit,” Tony screamed down at him.

The other guy landed a savage kick and Stone yelped and rolled around and around on his back like a turtle, gasping, gagging, wrenching at his belt. He got it loose. Scrabbled for the buttons and the zip. He tore the pants down over his legs. They snagged on his shoes and he wrenched them free and pulled them off inside out.

“Get up, Mr. Stone,” Tony said, quietly.

Stone staggered to his feet and stood, unsteadily, leaning forward, head down, panting, his hands on his knees, his stomach heaving, thin, white hairless legs coming down out of his boxers, ludicrous dark socks and shoes on his feet.

“We could hurt you,” Tony said. “You understand that now, right?”

Stone nodded and gasped. He was pressing both forearms into his gut. Heaving and gagging.

“You understand that, right?” Tony asked again.

Stone forced another nod.

“Say the words, Mr. Stone,” Tony said. “Say we could hurt you.”

“You could hurt me,” Stone gasped.

“But we won’t. That’s not how Mr. Hobie likes things to be done.”

Stone raised a hand and swiped tears from his eyes and looked up, hopefully.

“Mr. Hobie prefers to hurt the wives,” Tony said. “Efficiency, you see? It gets faster results. So at this point, you really need to be thinking about Marilyn.”

THE RENTED TAURUS was much faster than the Bravada had been. On dry June roads, there was no contest. Maybe in the snows of January or the sleet of February he would have appreciated the full-time four-wheel drive, but for a fast trip up the Hudson in June, a regular sedan had it all over a jeep, that was for damn sure. It was low and stable, it rode well, it tracked through the bends like an automobile should. And it was quiet. He had its radio locked onto a powerful city station behind him, and a woman called Wyno

He was heading north on Route 9, and he had a Hertz map open beside him which went up far enough to show him Brighton was halfway between Peekskill and Poughkeepsie, over to the west, right on the Hudson. He had the old couple’s address beside it, written on a sheet from a medical pad from McBa

It took him an hour to get level with Garrison again, and he figured he would head on north to a big highway he remembered swinging away west over the river toward New-burgh. He should be able to come off that road just short of the Hudson and fall on Brighton from above. Then it was just a question of hunting down the address, which might not be easy.

But it was easy, because the road that dropped him south into Brighton from the east-west highway was labeled with the same name as was in the second line of the old folks’ address. He cruised south, watching for mailboxes and house numbers. Then it started to get harder. The mailboxes were grouped in sixes, clustered hundreds of yards apart, standing on their own, with no obvious co

He found the right mailbox. It was set on a wooden post that the weather was rotting and the frost heave was canting forward. Vigorous green vines and thorny creepers were twisting up around it. It was a large-size box, dull green, with the house number painted on the side in faded but immaculate freehand script. The door was hanging open, because the box was completely stuffed with mail. He took it all out and squared it on the passenger seat beside him. Squeaked the door closed and saw a name painted on the front in the same faded neat hand: Hobie.

The mailboxes were all on the right side of the road, for the convenience of the mail carrier, but the tracks ran off in both directions. There were four of them visible from where he was stopped, two of them to the left and two to the right. He shrugged and headed down the first of them, leading to the right, over toward the river.

It was the wrong track. There were two houses down there, one north and one south. One of them had a duplicate name-plate on the gates: Kozinsky. The other had a bright red Pontiac Firebird parked under a new basketball hoop on the garage gable. Children’s bicycles were sprawled on a lawn. Not persuasive evidence of aged and infirm people living there.

The first track on the left was wrong, too. He found the right place on the second right-hand track. There was an overgrown driveway ru