“I could get you four, if you wanted. Might take a week, though.”
“Two will be fine. How much?”
“Stuff like this ain’t cheap. A pair’d run you a hundred and forty. Best I can do. And it would have to be a cash deal.” He spoke with a regret that suggested we had been having a nice little techno-dream for ourselves, but now the dream was almost over.
“How much more would it cost me to have you do the installation?” I saw his alarm and hastened to dispel it. “I don’t mean the actual black-bag job, nothing like that. Just to put the bugs in a couple of lamps and hook up the tape recorders—could you do that?”
“Of course I could, Mr.—”
“Let’s say Mr. Doe. John Doe.”
His eyes sparkled as I imagine E. Howard Hunt’s would when he first beheld the challenge that was the Watergate Hotel. “Good name.”
“Thanks. And it would be good to have a couple of options with the wires. Something short, if I can place it close by, something longer if I need to hide it in a closet or on the other side of a wall.”
“I can do that, but you don’t want more than ten feet or the sound turns to mud. Also, the more wire you use, the greater the chance that someone’ll find it.”
Even an English teacher could understand that.
“How much for the whole deal?”
“Mmm… hundred and eighty?”
He looked ready to haggle, but I didn’t have the time or the inclination. I put five twenties down on the counter and said, “You get the rest when I pick them up. But first we test them out and make sure they work, agreed?”
“Yeah, fine.”
“One other thing. Get used lamps. Kind of grungy.”
“Grungy?”
“Like they were picked up at a yard sale or a flea market for a quarter apiece.” After you direct a few plays—counting the ones I’d worked on at LHS,Of Mice and Menhad been my fifth—you learn a few things about set decoration. The last thing I wanted was someone stealing a bug-loaded lamp from a semi-furnished apartment.
For a moment he looked puzzled, then a complicitous smile dawned on his face. “Iget it. Realism.”
“That’s the plan, Stan.” I started for the door, then came back, leaned my forearms on the transistor radio display case, and looked into his eyes. I can’t swear that he saw the man who had killed Frank Dunning, but I can’t say for sure that he didn’t, either. “You’re not going to talk about this, are you?”
“No! Course not!” He zipped two fingers across his lips.
“That’s the way,” I said. “When?”
“Give me a few days.”
“I’ll come back next Monday. What time do you close?”
“Five.”
I calculated the distance from Jodie to Dallas and said, “An extra twenty if you stay open until seven. It’s the soonest I can make it. That work for you?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Have everything ready.”
“I will. Anything else?”
“Yeah. Why the hell do they call you Silent Mike?”
I was hoping he’d sayBecause I can keep a secret,but he didn’t. “When I was a kid, I thought that Christmas carol was about me. It just kind of stuck.”
