“What about Sunday?”
“Well, I’m only going by one Sunday, mind you, but I’d guess it’s typical for him. He goes to the Methodist church and sits in a back pew. He wears a gray sportcoat and brown pants. He goes to the drugstore there on the corner and has a soda and buys the Chicago Tribune and the Des Moines Register. He disappears into his apartment until three, when he walks out to the park to watch the Little League game at four. When that’s over he starts walking down to the stadium in South End… another nice walk… where he watches the local semipro team play a game at eight o’clock. For supper he has a hot dog at the stadium stand. And I use the word stadium loosely.”
I scratched my head. “He always walks?”
“Unless somebody offers him a ride. Which is rare.’’
“Maybe he likes to walk.”
“Maybe. Anyway he doesn’t own a car.”
“What do you suppose he does at that plant?”
“Not sure, but it’s something in the line of janitorial work or clean-up or something. He’s there in between shifts. A group works till five when he shows, and another comes in at ten when he leaves. Since it’s food preparation, maybe he cleans the big basins or whatever. I didn’t find a way to check the place out too close.”
“Is that a big plant he works at?”
“Not particularly. One-story building, kind of medium- size. About twenty on each shift, by the way.”
“I don’t get this.”
“Neither do I.”
“Who’d want to kill a nothing like this guy? Why erase a zero?”
“Ours is not to reason why.”
That was the first sensible thing Boyd had said lately and almost restored my faith in him. Almost.
I said, “You’re right, it’s none of our business who hired us and why. Maybe all the waitresses this guy bugs got together and put out a contract on him, who knows? It’s not our concern. But…”
“But?”
“But this whole set-up is fucked over. Like this place… what are you doing at a lookout where you’re cooking meals and sleeping? What are you doing inside a furnished apartment, obviously lived in, like this one?”
“Who knows? Who cares? All I know is Broker gave me the address and a key to the back door. He didn’t give me any explanation, except that it was entirely safe. He said I was to say I was subletting the apartment from…” He thought. “… well I don’t remember the name offhand, but I got it written down somewhere. Carol something, I think it was.”
Bad. Christ, Boyd was getting bad.
“Anyway, Broker said the owner of the building, and the broad I’m supposedly subletting it from, would cover for me should anybody official ask. In the meantime, naturally, I’d leave town at once and we’d scratch the hit.”
“Does anybody know you’re here?”
“Not really.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well Broker knows, and I assume whoever hired us knows.”
Standard Operating Procedure was that the identity of our employer not be known to us. There were many reasons for that, most of them obvious, most providing various kinds of protection for the employer. But it also meant that we knew nothing of the motivation behind our action.
Another part of S.O.P. was that Broker-the middleman our employer contacted-received a twenty-five per cent down payment, which was his share of the fee; later, at a designated drop point, we would pick up the balance. But only after a lookout had had time to survey the situation and decide whether or not all systems were go. Should Boyd, for example, stake-out a mark and decide the job was either impossible or just too damn risky, we would back out and Broker would return all but a minimal fee for his and our time. Once Boyd, or someone like him, gave the go-ahead for the hit, a day would be set and the employer contacted, one way or another, and the rest of the payment made. Prior to the actual carrying out of the assignment. Cash up front or no hit. This was my policy, at least. Mine and Boyd’s.
“Listen,” I said, “is the drop all set for our money?”
“It sure is.”
“Where?”
“It’ll be in a garbage can right out back of this place, the day we make our move.”
“Is the exact day already set?”
“Yes. I called in today.”
“Don’t you think you should have waited for me? So we could’ve decided together, like usual?”
“Aw piss, this was so cut-and-dry, Quarry. Come on. Besides, I told Broker if you had other feelings I’d call him back and tell him about change of plans, if any. You and I’ll decide that.”
“All right,” I said “But somehow I don’t like the smell of this thing, or the feel of it or something.”
“You’re paranoid.”
He looked very young right then, the curly head of hair and eyebrows and mustache pasted on, like a kid dressing up like an adult for Halloween.
I said, “Let me tell you something, Boyd.”
“What?”
“Something’s changed with you. I don’t know what it is. Your personal life maybe. I don’t know. But unless you get back to normal.. by which I mean your normal efficient self… you and I, Boyd, we’re getting a divorce.”
Boyd sat up. Even in the dark I could see his face had gone white.
“We been together a long time, Quarry.”
“I know,” I said. “Maybe too long.”
12
Bunny’s was a bar and restaurant on the outskirts of South End, with a pizza place on one side and a Laundromat on the other, neighbors distant as well as disparate, as between them the three took up land enough for a block and a half of town. The businesses down there on the fringes of Port City were clean and mostly recent-built, and Bunny’s was no exception: a handsome darkwood single- story building, perched on a little hilly lawn with an almost absurdly large parking lot surrounding it. Long smoke- color windows fronted the street with not a solitary plastic beer sign in sight, and on both sides of the building, spotlight-lit and painted in big blue block letters, was the word Bunny’s.
It was approaching eleven-thirty when I pulled into the lot which had seemed oversize to me when I drove by that afternoon but right now was jampacked. I had no easy time finding a parking place and settled for one a good walk from the door and counted myself lucky. As I neared the building I heard rock music faintly and then the door opened and as some people came out so did the music, loud but not too loud and well-played by a live combo of drum-bass-guitar.
I was relieved to hear rock rather than country western, and not from my being a supporter or detractor of either cause, but because my experience has been that rock bars run to fewer fights than country western. I don’t really know why. It almost seems the more violent the music, the less violent the crowd. And with the rock bar’s younger patrons you’ll sometimes find a moderate amount of parking lot pot-smoking going on which can make for a scattering of sleepy happy people who seem to spread gentle, passive vibrations through a crowd; in a country bar a similar scattering of drunken unhappy people can send a wave of irritation through a crowd that can result in anything from a scuffle to a brawl.