Smart Moves by Stuart M. Kaminsky Read Free Book Online Page A

said.
    “You made him up?”
    “I live with my mother in Queens,” she said, sitting heavily on the bed. Her hair tumbled over her face and down to her over-ample but nicely freckled breasts. “I just go from Queens to Manhattan, Manhattan to Queens, and Louise has dinner ready.”
    “Louise is your mother?” I asked, slipping my pants on, with my .38 tucked under my chin.
    She nodded.
    “Nobody shoots at us in Queens,” she said sadly.
    I couldn’t tell whether she was excited or disappointed by the events of the last few hours, but I didn’t have time to find out.
    “Time to get dressed, Pauline,” I said gently but urgently as I shifted the pistol to my pocket and put on a shirt. “We’re going to have company in a few minutes and you have to get out of here and get those registration books back.”
    “My name isn’t Pauline,” she sighed without moving. “And it’s not Santiago. My name is Mary Louise Caldoni. I made up the name Pauline Santiago.”
    “It’s a beautiful name,” I said, buttoning my shirt, “but I haven’t got time for any more confessions. You’ve got to get dressed and out of here or you’re going to lose your job.”
    “The police,” she said and then stood up to scream. “The police. Oh my God. The police will be coming here.”
    I handed her her dress and urged her into it without a word. Hotels don’t send out for the police until they have to and until they’ve checked to be sure it is absolutely one hundred percent necessary. Having a squad of cops tracking through your hotel is not top-notch promotion. Hotels like to keep things as quiet as possible. I’d worked enough of them to know.
    “I’ve got to get out of here,” Pauline or Mary Louise finally realized, throwing her hair back and looking around for her stockings and shoes.
    I found the stockings but didn’t hand them to her. I shoved them in her purse and grabbed the registers.
    “My … Someone shot at us,” she said, standing. “My hair. I have to brush my hair.”
    Her hand went up to her hair. I took it down and put the registers under her arm. She was dazed. No one had ever shot at her before. I had no time to explain things to her, explain that the fear would never really go away, the memory would always be ready to come back. But that was only the bad part. There was also the part I was feeling now. The jumpy, crazy realization that I was still alive, that maybe I had come a cold breath from being dead. It was like being reborn and suddenly appreciating things you hadn’t noticed before—the smell of the cool air through the outline of Honest Abe in the window, the feel of the rough carpet under bare feet—which reminded me to put on my shoes.
    “You’re going to be fine, Pauline,” I said, ushering her to the door. “Get books back and get home to Louise. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
    “I told you my name isn’t really Pauline,” she said, stopping, wiping away her falling hair, and looking into my eyes as if great importance were attached to my accepting her sin. “It’s Mary Louise Caldoni.”
    “To me you’ll always be Pauline,” I said, opening the bullet-pocked door. No one was in the hall, not the guy with the white hair, not the woman in the curlers, no one.
    “But,” Pauline pleaded, standing in the hall with her black purse dangling over one shoulder, the registers under her other arm and her hair a dark bundled mess, “I’m a Catholic.”
    “I figured that out,” I whispered. “Better get going. We don’t want anyone to know you were here.”
    “It does look like Abraham Lincoln,” she said. “I’m not crazy or something.”
    “Just like Lincoln, right off a new penny. Amazing likeness,” I sighed. “Take the elevator. Get those books back. Go home.”
    I stepped out of the doorway, still holding my pistol, gave her a hug, and led her to the elevator. I pressed the button, gave her a kiss on the cheek, and padded back to the door to my room. She looked