Sharpe contemplated making a left and running, but he was frozen with fear. Then the light changed, and the blue car pulled away from him and continued down Second Avenue. He was startled by a horn from behind him and got the car moving again. He cut across three lanes of traffic and made a right. When he got to Lexington Avenue, he turned downtown again. The cops in that car had probably not been looking for him, he thought, then he started looking down Lex for the car, wondering if they were going to drive across town and cut in front of him.
When he finally got downtown to his building, after suspecting a dozen other vehicles along the way, he drove around the block twice before using the remote control to open the garage door on the ground floor of his building. Only when the steel door had closed behind him did he feel safe.
He took the big lift up to his studio and let himself in. Hildy was stretched out on a sofa at the end of the big room, which covered the width of the building.
“How did your business go?” she asked, yawning.
“Very well,” he replied. “Has anyone come to the door?”
“No, it’s been very quiet.”
“Any phone calls, especially with the caller hanging up?”
“The answering machine took a couple of calls,” she said. “Messages were left.”
Sharpe went to the machine and replayed the messages, both routine calls from an arts material supplier and a stationer. He walked from the studio into the office, where two middle-aged women worked keeping books and paying bills, then on to the lower level of his apartment.
He went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, grabbed a handle inside, and rolled the big unit away from the wall. Behind it was a cutout in the Sheetrock, with the cutout replaced. He took a small knife from his pocket and pried out the loose area, revealing a large Fort Knox safe. He entered the code into the keypad, spun the wheel, and swung open the double doors. Inside were stacks of tightly packed plastic bags in the lower half and papers and stacks of cash above. He opened his briefcase, removed the brown envelope, and stacked the newly earned money on a shelf. Then he took a ledger from the safe and made a coded entry. He closed the door, replaced the Sheetrock, wheeled the big refrigerator back into its place, and then leaned against it and mopped his brow.
He was getting paranoid, he thought. He had never made such a large delivery so far from his base, and the experience had wrecked him. The thought of the money in the safe made him feel better, though. How could he have thought that Mitzi Reynolds could be a cop?
Sharpe went upstairs and changed into paint-stained work clothes, then he went back to the studio, where he found Sig Larsen seated next to Hildy on the old sofa waiting for him. “Hildy, make yourself scarce,” he said to her. “Sig and I have to talk.”
Hildy left the room without a word.
Sharpe collapsed on the sofa. “Jesus,” he said, mopping his brow again. “I must be getting old.”
“What’s wrong?” Larsen asked.
“I made that delivery to Mitzi uptown,” he said, “and every cell in my body was in alarm mode. Once I was there I thought I’d be busted with all that product. For a minute, I even thought that Mitzi might be a cop.”
“That’s called paranoia,” Larsen said. “If Mitzi is a cop, then I’m Warren Buffett.”
“Or maybe Stone, who used to be a cop,” Sharpe said. “He was there for the buy, but he was in the kitchen. He must have stayed the night.”
“But you got out okay?”
“Yeah, but then I thought every car I saw was the cops.”
“Derek, you need to take some time off,” Larsen said. “Why don’t you take Patti to a hotel and fuck her for a couple of days? She could use it and, apparently, so could you.”
“So could Hildy, but it’s so boring with her, why bother?”
“When does she come into the money?”
“In a few weeks. She’s cagey about when her birthday is, so I don’t know exactly.”
“I can’t wait,” Larsen said. “I want her out of our lives.”
“So do I,” Sharpe replied. “You can’t imagine.”
“I can imagine. Patti’s got to go, too; she’s beginning to take being called my wife seriously. If we can scam both Hildy and Mitzi we’ll have enough to get out of this town to some place with nice weather and no extradition treaty with the United States.”
“And where is that going to be?”
“How does Brazil strike you?”
“I could never learn to speak Portuguese,” Sharpe replied.