I had the sudden urge to go back to that alley where I’d left Boyd behind a wall of garbage cans and see if the body was still there. If it was, I’d kick it in the ass.
Peg was staring at me, watching my eyes move with thought. When I came out of my near-trance, she said, “Is Vince the man… responsible?”
The man responsible? The man with the wrench? The man who killed Boyd? Who took my money? Who tried to murder me? Yes. Yes he was.
“Never mind,’’ I said.
“Do you want to know where he lives?” she said.
I nodded.
“Above the cab stand,” she said “There’s a wooden stairway in back. It’s the only apartment up there. He’s got the whole floor to himself. He makes good money driving a cab. Thanks to Ray.”
“Thank you, Peg.”
“It’s okay.”
“Now forget all about it.”
“I already have.”
“Good.”
“Quarry?”
“Yes?”
“Are you going now?’’
“I better.”
“Are you leaving Port City?”
“Yes.”
“Right now?”
“Soon.”
“Will I see you again?”
“Not tonight.”
“When?”
“Not tonight.”
“I’ll… hear from you, then?”
“You’ll hear from me.”
“Quarry.”
“Yes, Peg.”
“Come with me for a minute.”
“Yes, Peg.”
27
The same woman was sitting behind the glass counter, but she was wearing a different dress; she had traded in the red and white check for a blue and white, which was draped over her heavy-set frame like a pup tent without poles. Her hair didn’t look quite so frowzy this time, which probably meant she’d just come on during the past hour or so, whereas on my last visit to the Port City Taxi Service I must’ve caught her at the tail end of her tour of duty.
“How’s she goin’, mister?” she said, her smile a fold in the layered flesh of her face. She puffed at the last inch of a cigarette and flashed a brown grin and said, “What can I do you for?”
“Hi,” I said. “Hell of a night.”
“Hell of a night is right. Miserable as hell.”
“Yeah, all that damn rain. Listen, is Vince working tonight?’’
“Vince? Sure, he went on an hour ago. You want me to get him on the squawker for you?”
“No, don’t bother. Just wondered what shift he was working.”
“He don’t get done till early this mornin’ after dawn.”
“He very busy tonight?”
“She comes in spurts. Right now he is. He’s backed up four or five calls. But if you want to see him, just take a load off and wait. He stops in for coffee every hour or so, when he gets a slow spell. He’ll be along as soon as these calls is done, give him a half hour, forty-five minutes.”
“Well, I’ll come back in a little while.”
“Suit yourself.”
I bought a package of gum from her and swapped her smiles and went out the door and stood in the soaking rain. The night was particularly dark, the street lamps like flashlights in a huge dark warehouse. The street was full of rain and empty of cars. Only in the taverns a block down (Albert Leroy’s block) were there signs of life, but even the drinking crowd seemed intimidated by the dreary weather, the noise and jukebox music of the bars seeming muted, half-hearted. Up here, by the taxi stand, all was quiet, deserted.
I walked around to the back, passing Boyd’s green Mustang, and put on my gloves and got the nine-millimeter automatic firmly in hand. I climbed the open wooden stairway up to where Vince kept his apartment and got to work on his door. It had a new-style lock that might have been designed by a moonlighting burglar, the type of lock you can use a credit card to open. Once inside I pulled the shades in the kitchen and switched on the light and for a moment I was startled. For that moment I thought I was back where Boyd had stayed, back in that apartment I’d since found out belonged to somebody named Carol-the same pink stucco walls, the same new but cheap furniture like something you’d see in a middle-grade mobile home; the wall-to-wall carpeting was even the same color, a murky green. The layout of the apartment was identical to the other one and it was obvious the renovations of both had been handled by the same contractor. Which wasn’t surprising considering Vince and his sister Carol shared the same landlord in Raymond Springborn.
Vince was not a neat housekeeper. Any fears I might have had about coming in from the rain and leaving a tell-tale mess behind were quickly dispelled. The kitchen table was a sea of empty beer bottles and cans (mostly Budweiser) with more of the same littered around the edges of the room; the sink was full of several days dishes and the smell of garbage was so strong I wanted to wrap the whole room in brown paper and put it out for the trash. The bedroom’s focal point was its unmade bed, its sheets soiled and smelly and sticky-damp. Underwear and dirty socks and colored T-shirts and jeans were wadded and tossed here and there, as though Vince took off his clothes like a greedy kid unwrapping a Christmas present. On the bedroom walls were stuck various clipped-out pictures from porno mags, though nothing outright obscene: muscle men parading around in jocks, and lots of women showing lots, but nothing frontal below the waist. Vince’s taste did seem evenly divided between men and women, so the boy wasn’t strictly gay, and he wasn’t particularly kinky either, from the look of the pics on the wall; no whips or chains or that. Vince seemed to like his perversion kept within certain limits of good taste, and there was no real indication of a penchant for violence, though I later found some karate books in his closet, mixed in with automotive magazines, books and magazines on body-building and some “swinging singles” publications. The living room was better ordered than the rest of the place, probably because the only furniture was a sofa and a color television, the rest of the room being as empty as I imagined Vince’s mind and personality to be. Oh there were a few, just a few, scattered beer cans and bottles, and a half-eaten sack of corn curls and mostly eaten cup of clam dip on the floor by the sofa. A very mild, unimpressive mess after the kitchen and bedroom, which were the work of a virtuoso slob. The only other room in the apartment was the bathroom, which I’d rather not go into.
In the bedroom, in the closet behind the double sliding doors, under the stack of books and magazines, I found a spot in the comer where the carpeting could be pulled back and two loose boards easily lifted up and out and a cubbyhole revealed, and down in the cubbyhole, wrapped in a black T-shirt, was the money and the wrench.
I counted the money and it was all there. I examined the wrench. He’d scrubbed it down clean, but had kept it, and kept it hidden, like the moronic amateur he was. I looked at the T-shirt. I set the nine-millimeter on the floor so I could take the shirt in my hands and rip it in half. After that I felt better.
And then I put the money down into the deep raincoat pocket. The wrench I stuck in my belt and I put the torn T-shirt back down in the cubbyhole, replaced the boards, patted the carpet back in place, restacked the books and magazines, picked up the automatic and left the apartment.
Out on the landing I took off my gloves, found room in the deep pocket for both money and automatic, and walked down the wooden steps and into the taxi stand parking lot, where I transferred the money and wrench to the trunk of Boyd’s car. Then I went back into the taxi stand to wait for Vince.
Fifteen minutes later he came in. Strutted in. He liked himself. A lot. His jeans were tight and worn down around the hips, his skinny arms tattooed and wiry-muscled, hanging from his short-sleeve red T-shirt like plastic tubing, his hair was greased back like he just heard of James Dean and if I’d had a motorcycle I could have sold it to him. He said, “Shitty night,” to the woman behind the counter.
“Shitty weather, you mean?” she asked him, working on another stub of a cigarette. “Or shitty
fares?”
“Shitty everything,” he said.
“Guy at the back table wants to see you. Been waiting, acts like he knows you.”
“Yeah?” He leaned over to whisper, though he knew I could still hear him. “Who the hell is the bastard?”
“Oh, he’s been around here before. Just this mornin’ he rented some parking space from me.”
Vince shrugged and strolled over and got himself a cup of coffee and leaned against the counter and watched me. When he’d finished his coffee, he rooster-walked up to where I was sitting and sat next to me, close, and gave me his best chipped-tooth smile. He said, “Do I know you, Jack?”
My guess was he didn’t. We’d met twice before: once in that apartment, when he introduced me to his wrench; and again early this morning, when he approached me in his girlie voice. When he’d gone into that swish number this morning, I hadn’t recognized him; I didn’t figure he’d recognized me, either. It had been dark scuffling in that apartment, very dark, and my guess was he hadn’t seen me any better than I’d seen him.
“I was in here this morning,” I said, “remember? You were acting kind of cute.” I kept a hard edge in my voice to let him know I wasn’t back to see him because I found his body attractive.
He remembered. He got suddenly nervous, squirming in his seat, and he laughed, a coughing sort of laugh, and scratched his head. Waving his hands, avoiding direct eye contact with me, he said, “I was just putting you on, Jack. Do I look like some kind of goddamn fag?”
“No,” I said. “No you don’t.”
“So what do you want, anyhow?”
“I want to know if you’re interested in making some money.”
His smart-ass grin crawled over onto the left side of his face. He said, “I dunno, I dunno, Jack. I had me a… better than average couple days, you might say.”
“Piss.” I shook my head. “How much can you make driving a cab?”
He kept grinning, eyes twinkling with all sorts of private knowledge. “Just so happens you caught me when I’m not that bad off, Jack. So whatever your hustle is I ain’t interested.”
“You should be.”
“Oh should I be? I see. Suppose you tell me why you should be interested in me? I ain’t in the blowjob business, if that’s what you’re here for.”
I put on an indignant look and said, tightly, “Maybe I’m talking to the wrong guy. The guy I wanted was supposed to be a real hardass. I asked around to find just the right kind of guy, and they tell me, see Vince, this guy at the cab station, and I say, shit, I ran into that guy already, he’s a fucking queer, and they say, don’t let him fool you, that’s how he makes side money, rolling queers and generally hardassing it around. And they say this Vince isn’t afraid of doing anything, anything that’s got good money tied up to it somehow.”
He rubbed his chin. He wasn’t nervous anymore. He studied me for a moment, then said, “Maybe you got sent to the wrong place.”
“Yeah?”
And then the cocky little bastard wagged his head side to side and grinned wide and said, “Yeah, and maybe you got sent to the right place, only it just ain’t open for business at the time being, so forget it.” He stood up.
“I pay big and ask little.”
“Forget it, Jack.”
“One hour of your time.”
“Just forget it.”
“One thousand bucks.”
That caught him on one foot. He swallowed. His expression settled into a blank stare, which I took to be concentration. He sat back down. Then he started to nod. He was nodding more emphatically by the time he said, “Let’s go outside and talk. We can sit in my cab.”
I said, “Fine,” and followed him outside. The rain was easing up, but it was still insistent. We both were wet by the time we were sitting in the front seat of his cab. He was excited, his breath fogging up the windows right off.
“One thousand fucking bucks, Jack?”
“That’s right.”
“Times is good for me now, but even in good times I can use that kind of bread.”
“Who can’t?”
“But money that big, whew! Hell, Jack, that’s got to mean trouble, and I don’t know you from Adam, I don’t know you from shit, I don’t know period.”
“The less you know the better.”
“Fuck that shit, Jack! You can tell me what the hell’s going on or you can stuff the thousand. You haven’t even told me what the hell it is you want me to do.”
“All I want from you is one thing. One simple thing. I want you to drive a car for me. I want you to deliver a car.”
“A thousand bucks to deliver a car?”
“This car is special… what it’s carrying is special. The people you deliver it to will take the car to a garage and strip it down immediately and get the stuff they’re after.”
He smiled, tense, not showing his chipped tooth. He knew what I was talking about. He all but said, “Narcotics.” He wanted to say it. But he restrained himself. Finally he said, “Okay, Jack, but why me? You got a load of… Jesus, a load like that, and you ask a stranger’s help? You must be fucking desperate.”
“I am. I’m desperate.”
“What the hell’s the situation, anyway?”
“Well…” I made a show of weighing the consequences of telling him “the truth.” With mock reluctance I said, “My partner and I were making this run, and last night he took sick. Terrible sick. This was an overnight stop for us, so I figured by morning he’d be okay. But he got worse, much worse.”
“What was wrong with him?”
“I don’t know, food poisoning maybe, or some weird-ass virus. All I know is he’s practically dying. This infection or something hit him all at once, hit him out of nowhere, and now I need a driver. To complete the run. What do you say?”
“He’s too sick to drive?”
“I’m asking you, aren’t I?”
“That’s just it, it’s so crazy, you asking me.”
“Who the hell else can I ask in this damn hick town? You got to bail me out, Vince. The money’s good. Do it.”
“When is it, this delivery?”
“Midnight.”
“Shit, it’s after eleven now. Where we got to be?”
“The quarry on the river road, just outside Davenport.”
He was nodding his head, starting to buy it. He said, “We could make that, easy.”
“Good. You take the lead and I’ll follow you. After you deliver the car, I’ll drive you back to Port City.” I got a roll of bills out from my pocket, part of the money Mrs. Springborn had given me. I peeled off five bills, all of them hundreds, and tossed them in his bluejeaned lap. He stared down at them. “Five more like that,” I told him, “when the job’s over.”
He thought about it. He scratched his oily head and said, to himself, “This has been a day,” then to me, “Let’s get going, Jack.”
“Right,” I said.
We shook hands.
28
The River road followed the Mississippi’s edge faithfully, and no doubt provided much visual pleasure for folks out on sunny afternoon outings. On the one side of the road, cottages dotted the river shore; on the other side, a high green bluff was strung with all sorts of houses, from modest to lavish, mutually enjoying the scenic view. After ten miles or so the bluff dwindled and the ground became flat and fenced off, the rich farmland Iowa is known for; on the other side of the road the cottages had given way to thick forest-like clumps of trees. At times the road rolled up hills, one of them peaking and leveling out to provide an overview of the river from a breathtaking highpoint, while on the road’s left was a sheer cliff-like wall of rock, like something out of Colorado or Wyoming. Other times the road swung down through valley-nestled villages, quiet, sheltered little worlds removed from this era. The river road was a Sunday driver’s paradise, the scenery varied and having more slices of America along it than any single stretch of twenty-five-mile road you can think of. At midnight
, in the rain, it was a fucking nightmare.
I was staying a quarter mile behind Vince because I didn’t want him to get a good look at the car I was driving. I’d hustled him into my rental Ford and after he’d taken off I had followed in Boyd’s green Mustang. I figured there was some chance Vince would recognize the Mustang as Boyd’s and I didn’t want him tipping to who I was or what I was doing. On the other hand, I didn’t want to let him get out of my sight. Out of my reach. So I had to stay right with him, without tailgating him.
He’d questioned me about why I was trusting him with the delivery of the cargo-laden car, and I had to explain it six ways to get him to accept it. I kept inventing reasons and he kept shuffling and saying, “I dunno, Jack,” and then finally he said he guessed it made sense to him that I’d want him in front of me where I could see him, rather than in back where he could quietly disappear with my five hundred bucks and a car provided by me. Such a contingency he could comprehend, because it and every other crooked-ass possibility had occurred to him: Vince wasn’t smart, but he had a mind that twisted in those kind of patterns.
So everything was fine until he suggested he’d run up to his apartment and stash the five hundred and grab his windbreaker since he might have to stand out in the rain a while. Before that could develop into a problem, I threw my raincoat around his shoulders (pockets empty of course, the nine-millimeter in the front seat of the Mustang, under a newspaper) and pushed him into the rental Ford and bid him bon voyage.
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