“Help yourselves to a drink,” Jack called merrily. And then the door closed and he was gone.

For a moment, no one said anything. Then Cooper reached into his pocket and tossed Susan a deck of cards. “Stay busy,” he said. “It might be a while.”

Chapter 42

CHAPTER

42

Archie poured himself a double shot of Jack’s forty-one-year-old single-malt scotch. There was a mirror in front of him at the bar, and he could see Cooper watching him, his gun still drawn. Susan had moved to the gold-striped settee, where she now sat playing hearts with Karim. She was staring at her cards intently. Karim’s gaze was fixed on her, clearly waiting for her to make some sort of move.

“I can’t do this with you glaring at me like that,” Susan said.

Karim leaned forward on the settee and set his cards delicately on the table next to his gun. “Do you want me to refresh you on the rules?” he asked.

Susan narrowed her eyes at him over her cards.

Archie replaced the cap on the whiskey bottle and pushed it back in line with the other expensive liquor bottles. He’d blotted the scalpel wound with all the cocktail napkins on the bar and it appeared to have stopped bleeding. He could have thrown away the bloody napkins—each napkin was square with a drawing of a sailboat in one corner—but Archie left them in a stack next to the Tanqueray instead. He checked the reflection in the mirror again. Cooper was still watching him. Archie could see the silver glinting in his mouth. Anyone with teeth like that had done some hard living at some point.

“Do you want a drink?” Archie asked him.

“No,” Cooper said.

“AA?” Archie asked.

“Ten years,” Cooper said.

Archie lifted his glass and toasted Cooper in the mirror. “Congratulations,” he said. The whiskey was bright and smooth in his throat and he savored it for a moment before he turned around to face the room. The house was quiet. They hadn’t heard anything since Jack had left. No voices. No footsteps.

Cooper cracked his neck.

The clock ticked.

Susan pulled three cards from her hand and then made a face and picked one back up. “One more second,” she said to Karim.

Karim hooked a finger under his yellow bow tie and loosened it slightly.

Archie walked over to where they were playing and sat down in one of the two black leather club chairs that faced the settee.

Cooper followed him, and sat down in the chair next to Archie’s.

“He does that,” Susan said, indicating Cooper as she glanced up from her cards. “He followed me around during the whole party. You get used to it after a while. It’s like when a stray follows you on a walk. You know it’s not your dog, but it’s kind of nice to have him along.”

“Clever T-shirt,” Cooper said to Susan.