A Fountain Filled With Blood

“What’s to keep you from calling the cops as soon as I leave this house and having me picked up? With this much, I’d be charged with felony dealing for sure.”

Malcolm sighed. “Oh, for Chrissakes, use your head. If you were to get arrested, the first thing you’d do would be to roll on me. I’m not in any hurry to try to flush my entire stock down the toilet. It’s not going to do me any good to dick you over. It’s profitable for me to keep you happy. Just like it’s profitable for you to keep your head down and your mouth shut. If you don’t panic, we’ll all get out of this with what we want.”

“Except for Bill Ingraham.”

Malcolm’s voice was sharp. “Bill had a lifetime of getting what he wanted. Eventually, you have to roll off the bed and give someone else a turn. Here. Take it.”

Clare strained to hear what was happening, but the horn and floating guitar line of “Lie in Our Graves” masked any sound quieter than a voice.

Eventually, the other man spoke again. “All right.”

“Good. You going back to the party?”

“Are you kidding? I’m going to hide this thing under the seat of my car and drive slowly and carefully home. You?”

“I’m going to work the phones a bit and see if I can set up a sale. Ciao-ciao, man. You don’t have to worry. I’m going to take care of you.”

Clare thought that sounded like reason enough to worry right there. Then the realization struck her: Malcolm wasn’t going back downstairs.

There wasn’t any answering farewell, just a silence filled with quiet music. She pictured Malcolm tossing his jacket on the bed—on top of a suitcase stuffed with a gun and fat bags of heroin. Or maybe it wasn’t heroin. She wasn’t up on current trends in the drug market. She could feel a hysterical laugh waiting to bubble up from her chest, and she pressed both hands on her diaphragm and willed herself to stop.

“Hey, Joe. It’s Mal. Look, man, I’m calling because you had suggested I get in touch with you when I was ready to move a little more product than previously.”

He was getting on the phone and calling people who would be willing to spend ten thousand dollars for illegal drugs. She rubbed her lips hard, taking off what was left of her lipstick. Any guesses as to how he might deal with a woman who overheard his sales pitch? Any guesses as to what his customers might do?

Chapter Twenty-Four

Time to bail out of this plane, Clare told herself. And with Malcolm settling in for an evening of telephone conversation and music, there was only one exit still open to her. She picked up her shoes and, holding them tightly against her stomach, slipped between the edge of the shower curtain and the cool tile wall, all the while thinking to herself, flat, flat, flat.

Several hooks slid along the curtain rod with a scrape that sounded to Clare like a Klaxon. Her breath hitched up in her throat and she forced herself to keep on moving, until she was standing next to the toilet in her stocking feet. She couldn’t see out the crack in the door without getting right in front of it, but there was enough light spilling in from the bedroom to pick out all the details in the bath. The detail she was interested in was the window.

It was larger than the usual bathroom window, the same size as the two in the bedroom. Two stories up, looking out onto mountains, one wouldn’t require much privacy, she guessed. Like one of the bedroom windows, its lower pane had been pulled up almost to the level of the middle sash. She pressed her fingers against the screen’s releasing locks and slid it up as far as she could. It clicked into place on its runner with a noise that sounded as loud as a rifle shot.

Behind her, Malcolm was still chatting away and the Dave Matthews CD had looped around to the beginning and was jazzing along with “So Much to Say.” She loved the Crash album, but she wondered if she would ever be able to listen to it again after tonight. She eased the latches into place in the uppermost notches and stuck her head out the window to scope out her escape route.

The good news was that Malcolm’s suite overlooked a six-foot-square porch roof, an easy drop from the window if she were hanging from the bottom of the sill. The bad news was, the porch and its roof were attached to the kitchen. Over the jazzy beat of the Dave Matthews Band, she could hear the clang and clatter and chatter of kitchen staff engaged in a full-scale cleanup. Craning her neck to one side, she could see the outlines of several people clustered in conversation on the flagstone terrace surrounding the pool. All it would take would be someone glancing up at the wrong moment and she would look like a character from a Lawrence Block novel. She could see the title now: The Burglar Who Thought She Was a Priest.