“Love to,” she said, suitcase in one hand and train case in the other.
We’d spent a long day, mostly on the bus, with a non-Nimoy event at the state teacher’s college in Kirksville. Light attendance compared to yesterday and a disappointment, though the Reverend’s rousing speech got great response. If you’re wondering, André had done no business this afternoon, at least not that I caught him at.
“I’ve eaten breakfast at Duff’s,” I said to her. “I wonder if it’s as good at night? Or if they’re even open.”
She was smiling and nodding, and now I realized some of the Afro bounce was due to its being a wig. “They’re open and very good — such a cool funky place. The Croque Monsieur is to die for.”
“What’s that?”
“A kind of grilled cheese and ham sandwich.”
“I’ll try it, but I won’t give my life for it. What about this luggage? We don’t want to lug it there.”
“I have a key,” she said, nodding toward the HQ entry. “I can leave mine inside. Yours, too, if you like.”
“No,” I said, “I’m parked a couple blocks down,” nodding across the street. I didn’t want her to know I was living so nearby, not at the YMCA, which was the address I’d supplied the Coalition. “You slip yours inside and I’ll walk down and put mine in my car trunk.”
That seemed an acceptable plan to her, and she was letting herself in as I walked across the street with my suitcase. Around the corner, I went down the alley, where my Impala SS was parked. For several seconds, I just stood there like a guy on a railway platform who missed his train.
A yellow late ’60s Dodge Charger — well-maintained, nice and clean — was next to the Impala on the graveled, slightly sloping parking area behind our building. Far as I knew, now that my little redheaded waitress had moved on, the third-floor apartment was vacant. So this did not seem to be a new neighbor.
Whoever he or she was — no, he... that Dodge Charger was a guy’s ride — the vehicle told me something about the owner. Well, not the vehicle so much as the mint-green “Heart of Dixie” Alabama license plates and the Confederate flag decal on the back window.
I unlocked the Impala trunk and shut the suitcase in there.
Ruth was waiting patiently in the recess of the HQ doorway. The bus was gone and so were any other staffers.
“Honey,” I said, “I’m sorry. I just remembered I promised somebody I’d do something tonight.”
“Oh... well, sure.” She seemed justifiably hurt by that lame excuse, but I didn’t dare be any more specific.
I asked her, “Do you have a car?”
“Sure.”
“Rain check?”
“You bet.” But the sticky-red smile was strained.
I gave her a kiss on the cheek, said I was sorry, and hustled across the street.
At the Impala, I opened the trunk back up and got in my suitcase, taking out the nine millimeter, which I’d folded up in some sportshirts. The noise suppressor, a black tube a little longer than the gun itself, had gotten an undignified wrapping up in my dirty underwear; I screwed it onto the Browning barrel.
Above the weathered wood of the second-floor deck, the kitchen lights were off. Nothing suspicious about that. Nothing suspicious except that Charger, which I wished was away down south in Dixie. Away, away.
I transferred the silenced weapon to my left hand and held it to my side. Went up the back stairs as quietly as I could — the boards had creaked since the day they were hammered together and tonight was no exception — and crossed the deck to the back door. The key I worked as gently as possible, but of course it made its little click.
I paused, as I dropped the key in my windbreaker pocket, looking through the door’s double glass panes across the darkened kitchen, to see if anyone would emerge. Emerge as in charge the fuck in there with a gun blasting or anyway raised to do so.
The door stuck some, so I had to put some shoulder into it, but I tried to do that gently too — the nine mil with its endless silenced barrel was in my right hand now — and the door gave and I stepped in. I left it ajar, which I didn’t love doing, but making a sound was the greater risk.
I could hear a voice echoing down the boxcar rooms. All the doors were open. That might or might not be a good thing.
“Now, li’l man,” somebody drawled, the Charger owner no doubt, “you best loosen up your lip ’fore I wipe it the hell off your ugly puss.”
I toed off my sneakers, oh so carefully. In my stocking feet I crept to the open door to my bedroom, where the lights were also off. Peering around I could see all the way down to the living room, where a big guy in a green-and-black plaid shirt and jeans and clodhoppers paced an area of four or five feet slowly in front of Boyd, who was in a chair with his hands tied behind him. Probably duct-taped, because that was how his ankles were bound to the kitchen chair he was in. I was two rooms away, and they were in the middle of the living room, but I could easily see that Boyd’s face was a battered bloody mess.
Boyd, knowing our target was out of town, had probably been loafing today, watching TV, in a white t-shirt and pajama bottoms and bare feet. Well, it had been a white-shirt. It was splotched scarlet now, like a tie-dye job that never really got off the ground.
“What in the fuckin’ name of our lord and savior Jesus H. Christ are you doin’ here, Jewboy? Best open that piehole now. Or you rather die in that chair?”
Boyd wasn’t Jewish, at least as far as I knew, but he didn’t correct the guy. He seemed barely awake, his eyelids swollen till only slits were left, his mouth puffy, welts and abrasions at odd angles on his cheeks, like war paint applied by a drunken Indian.
The big man — a good six-three, broad shoulders, narrow waist, muscular legs, a regular lumberjack in that plaid shirt — backhanded Boyd with a left. His right had a Smith and Wesson .22 auto in it. Not a small weapon, yet it looked like a purse gun in that massive fist.
I was in Boyd’s room now. By the door. Or anyway by the nightstand where his latest fairy porn paperback was folded open. Funny, the lumberjack sported a thatch of blond hair, like he’d walked off the cover of one of Boyd’s books — a dream man, giving him a nightmare time of it.
“You been watchin’ them niggers across the street, ain’tcha? Why? What the fuck you up to, you kike sumbitch?”
Boyd’s surveillance set-up was over by the window, the pillows, the radio, the binoculars, the notebook.
Boyd licked his puffed-up lips and said, “I’m not Jewish, you big steaming pile of shit.”
That cleared that up.
He backhanded Boyd again. “Don’t get mouthy with me, you little cocksucker!”
“You’re... you’re getting warmer, asshole,” Boyd said. He was smiling a little. Not defiance in the face of fear and pain, no — he saw me in the doorway.
But our guest didn’t.
Not wanting to fuck up the suppressor — it had taken a long damn time to find one worth a damn — I shifted the gun so that I held it by its barrel, tubing angled down, and swung the nine-mil butt like I was pounding a stake into the ground, making a satisfying mushy crunch. Still, he was so big I had to reach up to do it, and I wondered if he’d just say, “Owww!” and turn and look at me with one eye squinting.