“Do that.”
“I will.”
“But before you do, maybe you might tell me who I’m supposed to be watching.”
“Oh. Sure. Little ginky guy, about five-eight.”
“Three inches taller than you, you mean.”
“God, you’re a fucker.”
“Never mind that. Tell me some more about him.”
“What more? That’s it, just a gink, and a blind gink at that, always wears tinted glasses. Usually wears gray slacks and a cardigan sweater.”
“A cardigan sweater? In the summer?”
“Yeah. It’s got those diamond-shape type of patterns on it, in shades of gray. Damn thing looks like a big argyle sock.” Boyd snickered.
“Shit, it’s eighty degrees out there.”
“Naw, it’s cool tonight, but this guy leaves the sweater on even when it’s hot. It was up to ninety two days ago and he still had the sweater on.”
“Sounds like an oddball.”
“Believe me, we’re doing the world a favor on this one.”
“Is it his apartment you’re watching, or what?”
“Yeah. The building right across from us, but down a floor. There’s a do-it-yourself laundry below him and another apartment, empty, above him.”
I went over to the window, standing to the side against the wall. I looked out. This was a weird commercial district, kind of off to one side of the downtown, on one of the streets running perpendicular to the river and just on the border of a dip where factories and plants took over down to the edge of the slope of East Hill. On the corner, to the right, was a fancy drugstore, taking up a quarter of the block, its tall display windows full of expensive gift-shop-type items. Next to it was an incongruously sleazy bar, and then the VFW hall, and another bar, and the taco joint, and the laundry, and a coin wash.
I said, “The second floor, there? Where the light is on and kind of yellowish?”
“Yeah. His eyes are bad, wears tinted glasses remember, and near as I can tell all the light bulbs in his apartment are yellow like that.”
“You feel you got his pattern down pretty good?”
Boyd nodded, confident. “He won’t be coming out again tonight, until quarter to nine. Then he walks down to that drugstore and has a soda at their fountain. Or at least that’s what he had the two times I followed him in and watched him up close.”
“A soda.”
“Yeah. Thank God I got a refrigerator full of beer here, or I’d go nuts walking by a bar to go into a drugstore for a soda.” Thinking of it, Boyd came over and leaned down and got his can of Bud, then, as an afterthought, picked up his paperback as well He said, “You go ahead and watch a while. Yell if he starts to leave or something.”
I sat down. No need to play contortionist like Boyd: it would be easy watching from here, since this window on the third floor was well above street eye-level, and safely above second-floor level.
“Quarry?”
“Are you still in here?”
“It’s… good to see you.”
“Is it.”
“You’re pissed off, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“What’re you pissed off about?”
“Nothing.”
“You think I let you down last time, don’t you?”
“You didn’t let me down.”
“You think I did. You think I didn’t watch that guy in Toledo as close as I could’ve. You think if I’d done my part you wouldn’t almost’ve got seen leaving when those people showed at the place next door.”
“We been all over that.”
“Have we?”
“We have.”
“I’m telling you, Quarry, you can watch a mark for a week, two weeks, and you can get his life down fairly well, but there’s always going to be a joker or two turn up in the deck, you know? Hell you could watch a year and stuff could still crop up. The unexpected, right? You got to expect it.”
“Your tacos are getting cold.”
“Okay. How much do I owe you?”
“For what?”
“The tacos.”
“Christ!”
“Okay, okay.” He trudged out of the room.
I turned away as he did and watched. A shadow slowly shuffled across the yellow window across the way. Then nothing. I watched.
11
The yellow window went black.
“Just turned out the lights, didn’t he?”
I cocked my head and looked at Boyd. He was glancing at his wristwatch and he had a wiggly little grin going under his curly brown mustache. He was showing off: from where he was, stretched out on the davenport against the wall behind me, sipping his latest Budweiser, he couldn’t see the window that had just gone dark. But he wanted me to know what a swell job he was doing, how perfect he knew the mark’s pattern. How just checking the time he could tell me what the mark was doing. I could almost feel on my own face the heat from his semidrunken glow.
“Yeah,” I said, turning back around, keeping my back to Boyd, keeping up my vigil.
“You might as well not bother watching anymore.”
“Oh?”
“The lights won’t be on again. He won’t be going out again either. He’s got a clock built in him, this gink does. And a boring damn clock it is.”
I looked at Boyd. I sat and leaned my shoulders against the wall and folded my arms and said, slowly, “Maybe you been at this too long.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re getting sloppy.” I glanced back out the window, making a pretense of keeping up my watch on the apartment across the way, just to let Boyd know I didn’t trust his judgment anymore.
“Aw bullshit, Quarry. Bullshit. You’re the one’s been in it too long. You’re getting old and paranoid.”
“I’m getting old? Christ, you got fifteen fucking years on me, Boyd.”
“Age is a state of mind.”
“Is it.”
“It sure as hell is. Take the mark over there,” he said, gesturing toward the window, “he was a hundred years old the day he was born. He’s supposed to be thirty-five but he walks around stooped over and shambles along with his head down like he’s looking for a hole to curl up and die in. He isn’t a man, he’s a tombstone walking around.”
When he said that it was all I could do to keep from laughing. Because as he spoke he was sprawled out on the davenport, hanging loosely over its edge, like a cadaver somebody was playing a morbid ventriloquist’s joke with.
I said, “Maybe it’s time you told me something about him.”
Boyd nodded, sat up a little. “He’s thirty-five or so, like I said. No wife. No friends I seen so far. No social life whatever. Works ungodly hours, about half-time, at a plant in the part of this town they call South End.”
“What kind of plant?”
“Something to do with food. He goes there at five in the morning and gets out round ten. He spends the rest of his day walking around the downtown.”
“Every day?”
“Yeah. And don’t think I’ve enjoyed getting up at four-thirty A.M. like that gink over there. Shit.”
“What does he do in the afternoon, exactly? When he walks around downtown.”
“Oh, he’s got his little daily routine. He goes to Woolworth’s after work for his lunch. It’s about eleven when he gets there, and he beats the noon rush that way, and has the waitresses to himself. He likes to pester them, in a gentle kind of way. They laugh at him behind his back but treat him pretty decent to his face. After that he walks from Woolworth’s to the Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop out at the Port City Mall.”
“The shopping center, you mean?”
“Right.”
“Christ, that’s some walk.”
“Tell me about it. Anyway, he goes there and has a banana split, even though there’s a chubby kid behind the counter who cracks up laughing every time he walks in. But he doesn’t seem to notice, or mind anyway. When he’s through he walks back downtown. By that time it’s two-thirty. He goes to a place called Hermann’s, which is sort of a drugstore but no prescriptions. But everything else a drugstore has, from Tampax to comic books. And a fountain, where he sits and has a Coke and bothers the waitresses, who put up with him. He spends an hour there, so at three-thirty he sets out for the hospital, where he has a piece of pie at the hospital lunch counter. He enjoys himself there because the help changes every day as it’s local housewives doing volunteer work for a hospital auxiliary and so he’s treated pretty nice by them, since they’re public-service-minded and don’t have to see him day after day, like the other waitresses he comes up against. At four-fifteen he starts walking back downtown and ends up at the Port City Journal, where he buys a paper fresh off the presses from the coin machine out front. By four-thirty he’s back to his apartment where he goes up to read his paper or jack off or whatever. Anyway, he comes back out at six-thirty and here’s where his day gets exciting: he chooses, at random, what restaurant he’s going to eat his supper at. At random means one of four places, but I’ll give him credit for breaking pattern here, as in the week I been on his ass he’s jumped around irregular between the four.”