Alarm widened the brown eyes. “Really?”
“Yes. Is there anybody in your women’s group who is a little... too extreme? Who might actually try to hurt Max? Even... really do him harm? Does that sound crazy?”
She took the question seriously. No laughing it off.
“I guess you know,” she said, “a few years ago... on campuses like ours... some radical groups really got out of hand... blew up ROTC buildings and so on. But, Jack, I promise you... we aren’t militant. We’re dedicated. But not violent.”
I picked up the check — no argument from my feminist companion — and back in the Mustang, we headed toward her apartment building, the Claridge at Florence and Madison. She smiled into the breeze that made a trailing mane of her blonde-touched brunette hair. A lovely girl. Young woman.
I found a place on the street just down from the venerable but well-maintained ’20s-era red-brick seventeen-floor apartment building. Across the street sprawled the University of Memphis campus — this was expensive housing, about as handy as you could get.
Daddy treated his little girl/woman well.
She swung toward me. “You want to walk me up?”
“Sure.”
On the sidewalk, we walked side by side, close enough that we brushed a shoulder against each other occasionally. Political talk aside, I could tell she liked me. And I could tell I liked her. She had a lot of ideas, which meant something was going on between her ears, and she hadn’t been ruined by life yet. That was refreshing.
The marble-floor lobby was all trendy art galleries and funky shops, for and by hippies with dough. A pharmacy called Maggie’s was still open and it was almost ten, for those interested in legal drugs. We took an elevator that was spacious enough for a uniformed operator to have once ridden with us comfortably.
At the door of her seventh-floor apartment, we stood awkwardly, like junior high kids on a first date.
“You want to come in for a minute?”
“Sure,” I said. “For a minute.”
It was an efficiency apartment — one large room with kitchenette, living-room area with sleeping quarters tucked off to one side, with a separate bathroom of course. The furnishings were Danish modern and the walls were decorated with posters — Einstein sticking his tongue out, Mr. Spock from Star Trek, “We Can Do It!” (Rosie the Riveter making a muscle), a peace poster with matching symbol. Off-campus or not, this was a dorm room. A rich girl’s dorm room — not a grown woman’s apartment.
The lighting was low, just a table lamp, on an end table on which I discreetly deposited my nine millimeter wrapped in the windbreaker. We plopped onto a couch that was more comfortable than it looked and she asked me if I wanted to smoke. I didn’t figure she meant tobacco. Either way, I said no thanks. She had a pitcher of lemonade in the refrigerator and got us a couple of glasses. A window was letting in nice cool air and some night sounds, muffled traffic but also that breeze ruffling trees.
“You’re interesting,” she said. “Did you go to college?”
“No. I went to Vietnam.”
She thought about that a while, her eyes tight and troubled and excited. “Did you... kill anyone?”
“Yes.”
“Does it... bother you?”
“No.”
“Why doesn’t it?”
“They were there to kill me.”
“But... weren’t you somewhere where you weren’t wanted?”
“Some of them wanted us there. Others didn’t. I don’t talk about this.”
“See... you are bothered.”
“I bet you protested it.”
“What?”
“The war.”
“No. It was... kind of before my time.”
Shit.
“I’m not a prude,” she said. Kind of a non sequitur, but she said it.
“I never said you were. Never thought it, either.”
She kissed me. Hard and sudden. I kissed her back and it got softer, sweeter. We necked a while. I slipped my hands under her protest t-shirt, but she didn’t protest. Her breasts were warm and soft and round, the tips soft, then hard. She rubbed the front of my jeans.
“See,” she said, “I like sex.”
“I believe you,” I said.
We necked and petted for maybe half an hour. After a while I put my hand between her thighs, rubbing the cutoffs over the zipper area. Then she got onto her back and we dry-humped. I started to undo her cutoffs but she grabbed my hand and stopped me, shaking her head. Then we dry-humped some more. Very high school. Kind of charming. But that was as far as it got, and I stopped short of making a mess in my trousers.
She seemed embarrassed when she walked me to the door, hand in hand. Was it because we’d gone as far as we had, or because that’s all the farther she’d allowed us to go?
“I wouldn’t mind seeing you again,” she said.
“That was the impression I got. What’s your number?”
“You want me to write it down?”
“No. I want to remember it.”
The erection rode all the way back to the Highland Strip with me. Erection aside, I was oddly excited and a little irritated. I’d been blown by a stripper and humped by a housewife, and now a college girl wasn’t letting me go all the way.
How much sex did these people think I could stand?
My parking spot on the side street was waiting for me. The lights were off in the stakeout pad, but I knew Boyd was up there, probably with his binoculars in hand. I pulled in to the space, my hard-on finally getting it into its head that nothing was going to happen right now, and glanced toward the pawnshop building across the way.
Lights were on behind the shades in the third-floor windows of the unoccupied apartment.
Nine
The sight of Boyd in his nylon pajamas — salmon with black piping — might have amused me had I been in the mood.
But I wasn’t, the two of us sitting on the frayed flat-cushioned couch in the living room of the stakeout pad with only the light from the hallway giving us any illumination at all.
Meanwhile, the lights seemed to be on in every window of the third-floor apartment above the pawnshop across from the Climax Club.
Boyd asked, “What do you make of it?”
I was not in my pajamas. I was still in the t-shirt and jeans and windbreaker with the nine millimeter Browning in my rear waistband. Ready to go back out into the fray if need be. If a fray was what was out there.
“Could be a new tenant,” I said. “A real one. I can scope that out tomorrow.”
“And if it isn’t?”
“Then one half of the team has arrived.”
“The passive half. The stakeout guy.”
“If it’s a team.”
“What do you mean, Quarry?”
“I mean, we’re judging everything by the procedures the Broker’s people go by. We can’t be sure those procedures apply here. It could be a single shooter, doing his own surveillance.”
Boyd shrugged. “Or it really could be a stakeout guy, and if so, that means he’ll spend anywhere between two days and two weeks, building a pattern for the target.”
I thought about it. “If it’s a team of two, with a similar M.O. to ours, the passive half is moving in and getting the pad set up as temporary quarters. Like you say, for maybe as long as two weeks.”
“Right.”
“Which means the active half, the shooter, will show up some time between a few days and a couple of weeks to get briefed by his backup and maybe do some surveillance himself, before going forward.”
Boyd’s eyes narrowed. “So probably Max Climer isn’t in immediate danger.”