Follow the Sharks by William G. Tapply

about the size of a softball, and the pins are tall and slender. When I reached the foot of the stairs I noticed that the pitch of the din was set an octave or so higher than that of the ten-pin lanes upstairs.
    The people were just as boisterous.
    The pay phone was set against the wall at the far end of the alleys. A woman with “Prime Time Players” stitched in script across the back of her bowling shirt was talking into it. I moved to stand near her. She glanced up at me, her black eyes crackling with what appeared to be anger. “Molly” was written on the pocket over her left breast.
    “Look,” she was saying into the phone, her eyes appealing to the ceiling for patience, “I really gotta go. That’s just your problem and you’re gonna hafta take care of it… There’s some guy standing here waiting for the phone, and I don’t wanna talk about it anyway. In case you forgot, I am married, you know?”
    She glowered at me, shifted her eyes to the receiver she held in her hand, then said softly, “Yeah, me too, honey. Yeah, it sounds nice. But I really do. I really gotta go.”
    She held the phone away from her ear and stared at it as if she might embrace it, then set it gently on its cradle. She cocked her head at me, showed me the pink tip of her tongue, and tossed her hair. I watched her walk away.
    The jangle of the telephone was almost lost in the general din of the place. I picked it up before it could ring a second time.
    “Hello?” I said.
    “Mr. Coyne?” I could barely hear her, but I was certain it was the same female voice I had heard over my office phone the previous day.
    “Yes. You’ll have to speak louder.”
    She said something I didn’t catch. I felt an instant of panic. I could botch the whole thing up by misunderstanding the message.
    “Please,” I said loudly, cupping one ear with my hand and pressing the receiver against my other ear. “It’s deafening in here.”
    “I have your instructions,” I heard her say. “Can you hear me now?”
    “Barely. Yes.”
    “Okay. Get onto Route 2 heading west. In Lexington you’ll see a sign for Waltham Street. The first exit goes to Lexington Center. Pass that and stop on the overpass. Drop the parcel over the bridge. Do you understand?”
    “Drop it over the bridge to Waltham Street. Yes.”
    “What time do you have?”
    I looked at my watch. “Nine-eleven.”
    “You’re two minutes slow. All right. Drop the parcel off the bridge at exactly nine forty-three by your watch. Do you have that?”
    “Nine forty-three. Okay.”
    “Go, now, then.”
    “Wait a minute,” I said. “Will—?”
    I heard a click on the other end. I replaced the telephone and glanced quickly around. The gray-haired lady was nowhere to be seen, nor did anybody else seem to be paying any attention to me. Outside, the only noise was the swish of the traffic on Route 2 and the distant grumble of thunder. I could see lightning playing across the western horizon.
    I unlocked my car and climbed in, resisting the temptation to open the trunk to check that the bag of money was still there. I wanted to proceed with total caution, and I didn’t want to keep anybody waiting. I was acutely aware that it was E.J. Donagan’s life riding in my car with me.
    I nosed into the traffic and merged with the left lane so I could negotiate the traffic circle and reverse my direction on the divided highway and get onto the west-bound lane. I took it carefully. I had no desire to scrape fenders with some drunken bowler on his way home after a bad night.
    My little BMW purred up a long hill. Traffic was sparse, and straight ahead of me the thunderclouds hung low over the highway where it bisected a residential section of Arlington. The lights of the homes clustered on both sides of the road blinked warm orange. Everyone safe and snug in their living rooms. Over in Winchester, I knew, E.J. Donagan’s family huddled with an assortment of FBI agents and other cops waiting for my report.