“You heard him, Shorty,” said Millikin. “I can’t give you a price just yet. Timewise, we’ll just have to see how it goes.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Pat,” said Stewart. “We get a minute here?”
“He’s all right,” said Millikin, meaning Lawrence.
“A minute,” said Stewart.
Lawrence walked out of the garage without a word.
“I’m gonna be needin’ a rental,” said Stewart. “With plates. Something fast but no flash.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“I’ll find you somethin’,” said Millikin.
“You used to work alone around here,” said Hess.
“I needed more help. I got another place where I work on projects like this one. This here location is too visible, if you know what I mean. So I have to have another man.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know Lawrence from Kingfish. He don’t make me too comfortable.”
“Lawrence did time, just like you. He doesn’t talk to the law, just like you.” Millikin’s eyes caught mischief. “Matter of fact, now that I think of it, he ain’t all that much different than you.”
“That’s a laugh,” said Hess.
Millikin flicked his butt out the open bay door. “I’ll let you know when you can pick up your car.”
Hess and Stewart walked from the garage. Lawrence Houston was back in his seat, staring ahead, working on another cigarette.
In the Belvedere, up the road, Hess shook his head.
“Ever notice how they always have these real high-class names?” said Hess. “Couldn’t be plain old Larry. Had to be Lawrence.”
“Your mother named you Walter, didn’t she?” said Stewart, looking at Hess out the side of his eyes. “No one ever called you Wally, right?”
“It ain’t the same thing.”
“I guess it’s like Pat said. That coon back there, he ain’t all that different from you.”
“Aw, shut up, Buzz.”
Stewart smiled, reaching for the radio on the dash.
KENNETH WILLIS TOOK the last of the garbage cans from the cafeteria to the Dumpsters behind the school. Willis carried the can up on his shoulder, the way some men carried a sport jacket, casual like. He was strong enough to do it, too. Unlike his supervisor, an old man with the name of Samuel, who Willis called Sambo to hisself. Always yessirin’ everybody, keeping his eyes downcast, and scratching at his head.
Carrying a full trash can that way, it showed off the muscles in his arms. At work, he rolled the sleeves of his shirt high so that the ladies could see what he had. Wore his pants tight for the same reason. He could feel the eyes of a couple of the female teachers they had at the school studying him as he walked the halls. Some of the little girls who went to the school there, sometimes they’d be noticing him, too. Even if they were too young to know what was making them feel warm inside.
Coming out the back door, he dumped the garbage into this big old green container and put the can down on the asphalt. He reached into his breast pocket, withdrew a Kool, and lit himself a smoke. He dragged on his cigarette and watched the kids the way he liked to do. They had finished their lunch and were out there on the edge of the playground, kicking a red rubber ball around on a weedy field.
There was this one girl Willis had been keeping his eye on. Did her hair in braids and always came to school in some kind of skirt. Wore little white socks on her feet. Girl was only ten, but she already had an ass on her like a girl of thirteen. Willis had checked out the mother when she came to pick the girl up around dismissal time. If the mother was any kind of road map to where the girl was headed, well, this girl was going to a real good place.
Not that he was into little girls or nothin’ like that. He did have a few things with some young ones now and again, and that last thing with that fourteen-year-old, the one who’d put him in jail. Fourteen? Shit, the way that girl moved her hips? Only a full-grown woman knew how to gyrate like that. But that was behind him, anyhow. He had to be careful now who he put his eyes on. He’d gotten this job, even with his priors, because someone had been lazy in looking into his past. He didn’t want to lose this position, not yet.
Wouldn’t be long, though, before he was out. This market thing, and then a couple of hotel jobs that Alvin had been talking about. Willis would throw away this piece he was wearing, had his name stitched across the front. Like they thought he couldn’t remember it, had to write it on his shirt. And these dirty pants, always smelled like food the kids had thrown away no matter how hard he scrubbed them in the sink. This was not a job for a man like him. He needed to start living right. These mothers that came to get their kids, and these teachers, and some of these kids, all of them who looked away when he smiled, had to be because he was a janitor. After those jobs with Alvin, he’d come back in his street threads, driving a new car, maybe a Lincoln, and see how they looked at him then.
Willis dropped the cigarette to the asphalt and crushed it. He had one more look at that girl out there. He wondered what color panties she had on underneath that skirt.
He turned and went back into the school, headed for the janitors’ room, where Samuel was having his lunch. It was time to go to work. Not to do this bullshit work right here, but to do the work of a man.
Willis stepped into the cramped room, poorly lit by one bulb. Samuel was sitting at a table, eating a sandwich his wife had made him, drinking one of those little cartons of milk he’d gotten from the cafeteria, the way he did every day. Him and those baggy-ass clothes, with those clown patches of gray around a bald-ass head.
“I feel poorly,” said Willis, putting a palm to his stomach.
“That right,” said Samuel.
“Tellin’ you, I’m sick.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I just came from the bathroom, man. Didn’t know so much could drop out of one man.”
“Maybe you got yourself a worm.”
“Sumshit like it, that’s for damn sure.”
“You better go home, then,” said Samuel in a tired way.
“Thanks, boss.”
“Don’t forget to punch yourself out.”
Okay, thought Willis. I’ll go ahead and do that now. You just sit there, eating your sad-ass, sorry-ass sandwich, and let me go. Shoot, blind man in a coffin could see he wasn’t sick. Strong as he looked? Now Samuel was gonna stick around, making his pennies, while he, Willis, went on that thing with his cousin and scored some real cash. Wasn’t no trick to getting free to do it, either. You could fool this fool here every single day.