Or I could shoot out the window of the Fleetwood, reach in and open the car and hope this vehicle had a trunk release button; that should be standard on a Caddy, right? But where? Under the dash, or in the glove compartment, and oh by the way, those black bastards have killed me by now.
So I did what any other hero hoping to rescue a fair maiden would do: I went in and had a piece of coconut cream pie. I could use the sugar rush. The waitress was young and cute but not at all interested in a guy with greasy kid’s stuff on his hair. I ate my pie and drank my iced tea and did my best to listen to the two black guys in the booth right behind me.
Green hat: “Man, why not have some fun? Enos is gonna kill her ass, ain’t he?”
Red hat: “He might. He might not. Do you sit at the table with Enos and the others, planning shit? No. Do I? No fuckin’ way. We muscle. We goddamn good at it, but we muscle.”
“We could go someplace with her. Some motel or some shit. We tell her we let her go, she’s nice to us. We can fuck her one at a time or each take a hole.”
They were whispering, by the way. But I was right behind them, and even if I’m filling in a word here or there, trust me—I’m giving you more than the gist.
Red Hat: “You think she go for that?”
Green Hat: “Why not? These white girls, these college girl cunts, they sluts, they whores. And they curious about whether black men is all hung like fuckin’ horses, which I am and if you ain’t, that’s your problem.”
The previous had been mixed with laughter and was clearly kidding, but the guy in the red hat said, “Fuck you and the horse cock you rode in on.”
“Aw, come on, don’t be a dick. You think she won’t bargain?”
“Then what?”
“Then what, we tape her up again and take her to the boss.”
“And she tells the boss his boys diddled her up and down? How’s Enos gonna like that shit? What if Enos wants to trade the little twat? He might want her not fucked up and shit.”
“Well...I just sayin’.”
“You say too much, Leon.”
“Kiss my ass, Charlie.”
Not another Charlie!
They didn’t talk much after that. They had big platters of chicken and fries show up soon after. Yes, they ate chicken—fucking sue me. They ate chicken like all the white truckers around them were eating chicken. Jesus.
And speaking of truckers, the I-80 restaurant was packed. The I-80 Truck Stop was popular and the possibility of me getting these two alone was somewhere between slim and none.
So I finished my coconut cream pie and iced tea, and paid the check, and went back to my Maverick and started it up and sat waiting. Within minutes, Leon in his green hat and Charlie in his red hat returned to the Eldorado. Charlie again drove; maybe it was his wheels.
I let them leave the lot and take their ramp before I picked up the chase, if you can call it that. I was praying that that chicken, which everybody in the truck stop was gobbling down like junkies jamming heroin, was as greasy as it had looked and smelled going by on waitress trays. That might mean a bathroom break would come our way, and with just a little luck, that would also mean a state-run rest stop, not a restaurant or gas station.
Since I hadn’t seen either of them go off to the can, that meant those guys had the Sambo’s breakfast in their guts mingling with that greasy chicken, and if that combination didn’t explode into flying shit sooner or later, I didn’t know my chemistry.
And less than forty-five minutes later, the Eldorado pulled into a little rest stop right off the Interstate.
So did I.
The brick building was small, a glorified shed. Through its smoky glass front doors glowed vending machines. A car and two open spaces were between the Eldorado and where I sat in the Maverick. I watched the now hatless Leon rush in, holding his belly. Casually I got out of the Ford and walked into the little rest stop building. I had been able to glimpse a disgusted Charlie sitting at the wheel of the parked Eldorado, beating the heel of his hand against the steering wheel, possibly in tune to something on his radio. The engine was going.
Inside, the vending machines and a bulletin board that was mostly a big map of Illinois were in between the doors marked MEN at left and WOMEN at right. Next to the WOMEN’S door, just past the bulletin board, was another door that said PRIVATE.
I tried that door; it was locked. Over in one corner was an abandoned mop and pail, and a yellow plastic sign, an inverted V that said, CLOSED FOR CLEANING. This sign was up against the brick wall at my far right, just shoved there when a lazy employee took off work. This theory was validated by a notice on the bulletin board above the map:
NO ATTENDANT IN ATTENDANCE 10 PM—6 AM.
That seemed awkward to me: “ATTENDANT”/“ATTENDANCE.” Maybe I was hanging around the Writers’ Workshop too much. Anyway, it was nice news, knowing I didn’t have to deal with some poor janitor.
A guy came out of the MEN’S, a pasty-faced middle-aged character in a rumpled blue suit and no tie, probably a salesman. I had my hand on the restroom door, half-open, taking my time going in, watching the blue suit go out and cross to that other car parked between mine and the Eldorado.
Good.
I went in.
Man, it smelled like shit in there. Okay, that’s no surprise, but the chicken clearly wasn’t sitting well with Leon, who was in one of two stalls making a lot of noise, some of it from his mouth. I waited for him. Pee-yew, I thought.
I took a position at the electric hand drier, which I turned on, initiating its electronic wheeze, just as he finally flushed. My back was to him, so he couldn’t see I was wearing black Isotoner gloves and that the nine millimeter was in my right hand. I was hoping he had some sense of hygiene, because this would be easier if he did.
And, bless him, Leon went to a sink and began to wash up. “Man!” he said, and smiled over at me, flashing two gold teeth under the thickness of mustache. “I ain’t gettin’ any younger.”
I turned and showed him the nine millimeter and said, “You might not be, at that.”
He frowned; I’ve never seen more wrinkles in a face that young. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.
“Are you shitting me, white boy?”
“No. You’ve done enough shitting for both of us. This is a straight robbery. Behave yourself and we’ll be fine.”
“You got your fuckin’ nerve—”
I was in the corner between the sinks and the drier, good positioning in case Charlie got impatient or curious or something and came in looking for Leon.
“Very slowly,” I said, “take off that coat. I can see there’s something heavy in the right pocket, and since it’s probably a gun, I’d encourage you to go nowhere near it.”
“Fuck you!”
But he did it. He unbuttoned the jacket and folded it in half and laid it carefully across the sink, not wanting it to go onto the bathroom floor. Couldn’t blame him.
“Now carefully empty your pockets onto that jacket.”
He did. He had various stuff, including a fat diamond money clip, but what attracted my attention was the straight razor.
“Okay. Now get into that stall. Make it the one you used.”
That was the closer of the two.
I didn’t have to ask him to put his hands up. As my gun and I moved forward, he backed up toward the stall, and edged in, his eyes moving fast. He was thinking. He was planning.
“You wait five minutes,” I said, “before you come out. I’m going to leave you your watch. You exit any sooner, and you’re a dead man.”
Something in his eyes relaxed.
“No problem,” he said. “Just take my money and split. Everybody got to make a living.”
“I like your new attitude. Stay with that.”
He was in the stall now.
“Turn around,” I told him.
“Don’t do that, man. Don’t knock me out! You don’t need to do that shit.”
“I won’t. Turn
around.”
With a sigh of defeat and a disgusted sneer, he did.
“You can put your hands down,” I said.
He did, and that relaxed him.
When I cut his throat with the razor, the arterial spray got on the wall and maybe a little on him, but not a drop on me. I hate razors and knives, but they do have their uses, if you take a little care.
I arranged him on the floor so that he knelt over the bowl, where he did the rest of his bleeding into the water. That gave him the look of a guy throwing up, though the scarlet Rorschach test dripping on the wall was a dead giveaway.
I shut him in there.
The razor I threw in the sink. I wouldn’t be needing it. His leather coat I stuffed in the trash receptacle. Finally I glanced at myself in the mirror, checking for blood spatter I may have missed: nothing. My horrific greased-back hair was still in place.
In the outer area of the rest stop, through those smoky glass doors, I could see that no other cars had pulled in. I went over and grabbed that yellow plastic V saying CLOSED FOR CLEANING and placed it out in front of the MEN’S, but not blocking the path.
Quickly I went out to the Eldorado and knocked on the driver’s side window.
Charlie’s mustached face glowered at me; he didn’t have his red hat on now, and his head was shaved. Behind his window, he said, “What the fuck?”
I made a “roll the window down” motion, and he powered down the glass and said, “Do I know you?”
Hope not.
“Listen, your friend is in the restroom and he’s very sick. He asked me to come and get you.”
“Aw, shit, what is it now?”
That was to himself, or to the absent Leon; but I answered, anyway. “I don’t know, but he’s puking his head off. He said he was throwing up blood!”
Now some alarm came into Charlie’s face, and I stood back as he shut off the Caddy engine and shoved the keys in his pocket and threw open the door and rushed into the rest stop and on into the bathroom, past the yellow inverted-V CLOSED floor sign, with me on his heels.
He opened the stall door and said, “Charlie, what the fuck?”
I shoved the nine millimeter against the small of his back, right up against the leather of his coat, which muffled the blast, not as good as a silencer, but not bad under the circumstances. His spine must have been severed, because he dropped like a bag of laundry on top of the kneeling Leon. Just to make sure, I put one through his head, and red and white and gray and green splatter daubed the porcelain and steel fixtures, glistening and shimmering like spilled liquid mercury.
Somebody else could pull into the rest stop any time, and I had no desire to rack up collateral damage. So I worked fast, searching Charlie’s coat pockets, coming up with a big shiny .357 magnum and the Caddy keys. In hopes of robbery being the initial motive the local cops came up with (eventually the mob connection would surface), I performed the distasteful task of checking Charlie’s pants pockets, too. And, listen, it had already smelled bad in there, thanks to Leon’s chicken attack. With Charlie vacating in his trousers after I blew his spine apart, this was turning into a real hellhole.
But Charlie had his own fat money clip, and between Charlie’s and Leon’s cash, I gave it a quick count of three thousand and change. Not a bad perk, and the diamonds on Leon’s clip were real. I left the razor behind, still down in the sink. Not my style.
I did stay long enough to clean up one mess: I ran some water and got that Brylcreem out of my hair, then stuck my head under the electric hand drier for a few seconds. When I got that girl out of the trunk, I didn’t want to look like a total fucking nerd.
NINE
When I opened the Caddy trunk, its light clicked on and the girl gazed up at me with those big brown eyes, and a wide range of human emotion—fear, surprise, relief, hope, confusion—flashed one at a time through them, each punctuated by a blink. Under the duct tape gag, she made an unnnngggh that, while not as impressive as what her eyes had done, was fairly communicative at that.
“No questions,” I said, as I peeled off the tape. “We have to get out of here, right now.”
She complied as I helped her up and out of the compartment. That those long lovely legs had been somehow compressed into that space seemed as impossible as the old one-thousand clowns and one car gag. Her white leather coat with the white fur collar and a green pants suit with ruffle-neck blouse looked remarkably fresh, but her hair was every which way. The innocuous brick structure of the rest stop was our backdrop, nothing to hint at the horrors within the men’s room. She was stiff and I had to walk her over to the Maverick as gently as if this tall young woman were a little old lady. I guided her into the front seat passenger side, and came around and got in behind the wheel.
Luck was kind: nobody had pulled in here off I-80 to take a break or a dump or piss or any combination thereof in the vital seven minutes or so it had all taken. I had passed a larger rest stop perhaps twenty miles back where many trucks were parked, their drivers snoozing, but this stop was too small to accommodate more than a handful of semis, and we didn’t have even one at the moment. Nice to catch a break.
I had to keep going east, needing an exit that would allow me to get off and come around to head back west to Iowa City, although I wasn’t sure, frankly, if returning was such a good idea. Of course, I wasn’t sure of much at all, right now.
The heat was going in the car, just at a comfortable warm setting, but Annette was shivering, even though she was bundled in that lined leather coat with its fur at the neck, long brown hair spilled over her shoulders. She had her seat belt on, but was hugging the door, leaning in on herself as if trying to assume a fetal position while sitting down.
“You want more heat?” I asked.
She shook her head. Her fists clenched each side of her coat, holding it to her by the lapels as if she were freezing, but she shook her head. That shivering didn’t have much to do with the cold, I didn’t think.
“I’m going to turn around as soon as I can,” I said. “I’ll head us back.”
She nodded.
“Did they hurt you?”
She shook her head.
I just drove for a while. Maybe ten miles later I came to an exit, used it and then we were going west again. I still had the radio on, that easy listening station, but down so low you could barely make Dino out doing “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime.”
After a while, I glanced over at her and she wasn’t shivering any more. Her askew hair nonetheless framed in a striking fashion the olive oval that held her beautiful features. She looked more relaxed, even a little sleepy.
I said, “I was coming out of the restaurant when I saw those two grab you.”
She turned her head and gazed at me, almost as if noticing I was there. “What happened to them?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. This was the daughter of one of the top mob bosses in Chicago, so the notion of killing shouldn’t shock her; but then she’d just spent an hour or so stuffed into a car trunk, waiting to be raped and killed herself, so I thought I should err on the gentle side.
“I took care of them.”
Her eyes tightened.
I returned my gaze to the road and the moonlit highway and the surrounding snow-patched landscape.
She asked, “Who are you?”
“I’m Jack, remember?” I glanced at her. “Are you okay? Did you take a blow to the head or something? Don’t you recognize me?”
“Who are you really?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You work for my father, don’t you?”
I didn’t say anything.
“What happened to those men? Did you...kill them?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Did you, Jack?”
“...Yes.”
She swivelled her gaze toward the road. “Good.”
I was thinking fast, or anyway trying to. This had all been on the fly, and there’d been no time to waste cooking up a story
for the girl, if I somehow managed to rescue her. Now that I’d pulled off that unlikelihood, I had no option but to improvise.
“I do work for your father,” I said, “but I’m not one of his...whatever you call it.”
“Soldiers?”
“Yeah. I’m not a mob guy.”
“What are you, Jack?”
“I’m a PI out of Des Moines. I mostly do divorce work.”
“Aren’t you a little young for that?”
“I’m not the boss. I’m just an employee of the agency.”
She was studying me. “Just an employee, for some private eye agency in Des Moines. Not a soldier, for my father back in Chicago.”
“That’s right.”
“But you killed those two? Those big black fucking sons of fucking bitches?”
“I, uh...I was in Vietnam. Thought I mentioned that.”
“Oh. Yes.” Her eyes were on the highway now. “You did say something about that, to K.J. Sorry. I...I forgot.”
“Under the circumstances, understandable.”
We rode in silence for maybe a minute.
Then she asked: “You were watching me for my father? Why would he do that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe he had the wild idea you needed protection.”
You’d think that would have stopped her for a second, but instead she came right back: “Then you were watching me.”
I thought for a moment. The closer I could get my story to the truth, the better it would play and the easier it’d be to maintain.
“No,” I said. “I was watching Professor Byron.”
Her face jerked toward mine, eyes and nostrils flaring. “Why?”
“I don’t know for sure. I’m just doing a job.”
“Tell me what you do know, Jack.”
“Well...this is reading between the lines. I’m just a grunt in this war. But I think your father wanted me to gather evidence showing what a louse your prize professor is.”
“What?”
“I gathered photos of Professor Byron with another coed. And he’s married.”
She was sitting forward, shaking her head, which sent her long hair tumbling back into more or less its normal down-her-back configuration. “Are you kidding? I told you before, at Sambo’s—I know all about K.J. He’s a free spirit. I don’t love him, not that way.”
The First Quarry (Hard Case Crime (Mass Market Paperback)) Page 11